I came across this post on LinkedIn, by Mr Sukh Sandhu, that rang so many bells and checked so many more boxes.

Mr Sandhu, your insistence on outcomes is spot on – and, as you would most certainly know, for India, this is not a new realisation. It’s a reminder.

Those of us who lived through India’s ambitious Skills Development push learned this lesson the hard way: enrolments are easy; outcomes are hard.

India trained millions. Certificates scaled. Partnerships flourished. But the system largely stopped counting at certification. What happened six months later, or two years later – wages, job stability, career progression – was treated as downstream noise rather than core design.

This is where Australia’s skills ecosystem, for all its flaws, offers instructive lessons. It is not more successful because it is better funded. It is more resilient because it has developed institutional memory. It measures attrition. It talks openly about completion failures. It analyses employer behaviour instead of assuming goodwill. And crucially, it accepts that outcomes are a shared responsibility, not something the market magically fixes after training ends.

India, by contrast, optimised for starts, not finishes.

Australian policymakers now obsess over what you aptly call the “long middle” – mentoring, workplace culture, supervision, cost of living, dignity of work – because they’ve learned that skills systems don’t fail at entry. They fail quietly through drop-off. India saw the same pattern, but never fully built this understanding into system design.

Another critical difference: employers. In India, employers were treated as beneficiaries. In Australia, they are (slowly, imperfectly) being repositioned as co-owners of the system. Without that shift, skills systems collapse once incentives disappear. We’ve seen that movie before.

So when we talk today about outcomes, employability, and workforce readiness, it’s worth remembering: India has already paid for this lesson once. The risk now is not ignorance – it’s amnesia.

Skills systems don’t collapse loudly. They erode trust quietly – one incomplete apprenticeship, one unused certificate, one disillusioned young person at a time.
Australia learned that over decades. India learned it fast – and expensively.

The real question is whether we remember these lessons as we redesign the next phase of skills development in both our nations.