Distance Education represents a variety of educational models that have in common the physical separation of the faculty member and some or all of the students. (IDE, 2000). Of late, distance education has emerged as a tool to cater to the needs of masses and has played an important role in life-long-learning of knowledge based society. The requirements of flexibility and competitiveness are imperative to economic transformation in today's insecure world of work that is always in a state of flux. Shifting workplace and job necessarily causes concern for quality, skills encompassing wider connotations, and capacity to learn 'how to learn: The new Millennium will be characterised by accelerated rates of change which includes change in delivery of higher education and opportunities for continuing education and training.

There is andhas always been a gap between education and its utilisation in industry. In order to cope with the fast changing working culture and to have workforce with multifaceted capabilities and multi-skills, the organisations have created their own training and orientation centres. These training centres provide customized knowledge to mould unskilled/semi-skilled worker into skilled to multi-skilled workforce.

In India, the construction industry, the second largest after agriculture, has a critical role to play in terms of developing the infrastructure to sustain the desired rate of growth of economy. This sector does have the training and skill improvement centres but the mass population engaged in the construction industry gets little or no opportunity to get trained for the job assigned to them.

Open and distance learning as a system, with its capability for mass dissemination of education, thus, turns out to be the only viable alternative to generate a skilled workforce. lndira Gandhi National Open University, as a premier institute in the area of open and distance learning system, using the acquired experience in designing, developing and delivering multi-media self instructional materials, multichannel delivery of instructional inputs, provision of support services, and on-line networking is capable of cooperating and collaborating with industry in generating the workforce required by the nation. It is in this order, IGNOU-CIDC (Construction Industry Development Council) collaboration has allowed launching of certificate programmes (Construction Workers Vocational Qualification) to upgrade the skills of the construction workers. The present paper tries to look into the capabilities of distance education, and open learning institutions in organizing industry-customized training by collaborating with the partners.