The academic year 2024-25… yet another brand new opportunity to excel. Starting a new academic year is an exciting and pivotal time for both students and educators alike. Striving for academic excellence begins from the first moment the student enters the school or college gate with a clear-cut academic and career goal and a commitment to pay the required price.

Everyone wants to win, but few are willing to the pay the price. All students aspire for success, but only a select few are prepared to endure the hard work, discipline and the sacrifices necessary to realize their ambitions.

Students have to cultivate certain skills and turn them into routines to achieve academic excellence.

What is a Student Skill?

A skill is an ability or proficiency acquired through practice and education. Both hard and soft skills are essential in academic and personal contexts. Hard skills are specific, teachable abilities or knowledge that can be defined and measured. Soft skills are interpersonal or people skills that are harder to quantify. They relate how individuals interact with others and manage their work.

Student skills help in learning maximum with less effort and time. For a fruitful and meaningful life, students have to spend time on many activities apart from just studying. Study skills or academic skills are the subset of student skills.

Essential Student Skills

1. Self-motivation skills
2. Career Goals Fixation skills
3. Time Management skills
4. Reading skills
5. Note-taking skills
6. Concentration and Memory skills
7. Examination skills

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Vocational Education refers to education that trains students to gain specific skills to do specific work and enter into a specific vocation.

In ancient times, we had the Goldsmith Guild and Blacksmith Guild wherein people took training from these experts and entered into that profession. Today, we have ventured into Vocational Education along with higher academic education through Technical Colleges, ITI’s & specific Vocational Institutions.

In the U.S., we have community colleges. Ordinary Americans are unable to afford prestigious academic education; hence they attend Community Colleges and learn various technical courses and take up jobs for their living.

New India, in the wake of the Government’s new schemes, promulgated by Hon. Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, like ATAL Tinkering Labs, NSDC, PMKVY, MSSDS, is encouraging the youth to take technical skills and enter into the field of entrepreneurship or ‘job givers’ rather than ‘job seekers’. The Government is envisioning a generation of innovators from those with creative skills, industrial designs, good hand-motor coordination and general dexterity, ingenuity and creativity, thereby giving companies the skills they want and provide the workers with the fishing rods to fish for a better life.

All students are not good at academics neither can they afford it. Thus, we need to recognize this and offer vocational studies along with academic studies; the onus of educating or skilling lies with us, the educators.
Let us make the maximum utilization of the available space to help students of different interests take up a decent means of livelihood. We can and we must utilize the available space after or before school hours for various skill development courses.

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