India, July 15 -- A quiet shift is underway across India's professional landscape, and it's being led not by policy or corporates, but by the country's 21 to 30-year-olds. Skilling, in this new-age has become a personal revolution to navigate a world of rapid change, economic volatility, and AI-fuelled disruption.

Over the past year alone, more than 160,000 working professionals - many of them in their early-and mid-career years (21 to mid-30s) - enrolled in university-backed, job-linked certifications outside of traditional higher education. And more tellingly, nearly two-thirds say they are preparing for jobs that didn't even exist when they entered college. This is not a generational quirk - it's a workforce evolution in motion.

As I...