Half of India's graduates are now employable, and the other half is the story

For most of the last decade, the India Skills Report told a discouraging story in a single number: fewer than half of the country’s graduates were judged employable. In 2025 that number crossed the line. Overall graduate employability reached 54.81%, up from 51.25% a year earlier, and up from roughly a third ten years ago. It is the strongest reading in the report’s history.

The headline is worth marking. But the same report that delivers it also shows where the improvement stops, and for whom it is reversing.

What does “employable” actually measure here?

The figure comes from Wheebox ’s Global Employability Test, administered to more than 6.5 lakh candidates across over 7,000 institutions, paired with hiring-intent data from more than a thousand employers and compiled with the Confederation of Indian Industry . It is a test-based estimate of readiness for work, not a count of graduates actually hired.

Employability, in the India Skills Report

Employability in the India Skills Report is the share of candidates who meet a threshold on Wheebox’s Global Employability Test, a standardised assessment of aptitude, domain and workplace skills. It measures readiness for employment across institutions and streams, rather than the number of graduates who secure jobs.

That distinction matters. A rising employability score says the graduating pool is better prepared on the report’s measure. It does not say the labour market is absorbing that pool, which is a separate question the number cannot answer on its own.

Where are the gains, and where are they not?

By stream, the improvement is concentrated where it usually is. Management graduates lead at 78%, followed by engineering at 71.5%, MCA at 71%, and science at 58%. The spread between the top and bottom streams is wide enough that a single national average flattens very different realities.

The geography is similarly uneven. Maharashtra tops the states at 84%, followed by Delhi at 78% and Karnataka at 75%, with Pune, Bengaluru and Mumbai named as the strongest talent hubs. A graduate’s employability, on this data, still depends heavily on what they studied and where.

Why is the gender gap widening?

The most pointed finding runs against the overall trend. Men’s employability rose to 53.5% while women’s fell to 47.5%, from near-parity a year earlier. An improving headline number is hiding a divergence underneath it.

The report treats this as a warning rather than a footnote. If the national gain is real but women are slipping on the same measure, the improvement is being distributed to some candidates and withdrawn from others. That is a different problem from low employability overall, and it will not be solved by the same skilling programmes that lifted the average.

Conclusion

India’s graduates are, on the India Skills Report’s measure, more employable than at any point in the series. The achievement is real and worth stating plainly. But the average now conceals more than it reveals: a stream gap, a geographic gap, and a widening gender gap that moves in the opposite direction to the headline. The next stage of the story is not raising the average further. It is closing the gaps the average hides.