117. That is how many candidates were shortlisted at a single morning's job fair in Jammu on Tuesday, 23 September — out of more than 500 openings put on the table by the companies who turned up.
Put that beside the hit-rate on online applications, where a few hundred submissions into a portal can return nothing at all for months, and the arithmetic of physically walking into a room with your certificates starts to look very different.
What happened at Toph Sherkhania
The District Employment & Counselling Centre (DE&CC), Jammu ran a Job Fair-cum-Apprenticeship Mela at the Employment Complex, Toph Sherkhania. The numbers on the day:
- 500+ employment opportunities advertised across sectors by participating companies
- 117 candidates shortlisted
- A dedicated National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS) session, with around 110 registrations
- 9 apprenticeship contracts generated on-site — signed on the day, not agreed in principle
It was supported by the District Industries Centre, the Labour Department, the Skill Development Department and the participating industries, and ran an awareness session on self-employment alongside the hiring desks.
The catch, and it is a real one
These fairs are announced with days of notice, not weeks. The DE&CC does not have time to build you a profile when the invitation goes out — it works from the register it already holds. Which means the people who hear about the next one are the people already on the J&K Employment Portal.
And a great many young jobseekers in Jammu are not. Or they registered once, years ago, and the card has quietly expired without anyone telling them.
Who is actually on the register
Government figures tabled in the Assembly this session put total registrations on the J&K Employment Portal at 3,20,942 as of 31 August 2026 — 2,08,711 men (65%) and 1,12,228 women (35%).
The Jammu division accounts for 1,49,516 of those (97,749 men, 51,767 women). The Kashmir division carries 1,71,426 (1,10,962 men, 60,461 women).
The district table carries one number worth pausing on. The top five districts are Anantnag (34,543), Kathua (26,847), Kulgam (21,463), Baramulla (19,588) and Kupwara (19,510). Kathua is the second-highest district in all of J&K, and the only one from the Jammu division in that top five. For a district of its size that is a striking amount of registered, counted, contactable jobseeking — and it says something about how organised the Kathua employment office has been about getting people onto the list.
The gender split is the other number to sit with. Women are 35% of registrations UT-wide, and in the Jammu division the ratio is slightly worse — 51,767 of 1,49,516, close to 35% as well. Registration is free and takes ten minutes, so that gap is not about cost. It is about who hears that the register exists.
There are 20 District Employment & Counselling Centres operating across the UT.
Registering: the actual steps
The portal is jakemp.nic.in. It is free, and it is the government's own site — there is no agent to pay.
- Go to the portal and choose Job Seeker → New User.
- Enter your name, user type, mobile number and email address. A working email is a prerequisite, not an optional field — the system will not complete a registration without one.
- Submit. The department verifies the registration at its end.
- Once verified, download your Registration Card. That card is what a fair or a placement drive asks to see.
Two things people routinely get wrong. First, the card is valid for three years, and it is renewable online — so a lapsed registration does not mean starting from scratch, but an unrenewed one does mean you are no longer on the list that gets contacted. Set a reminder. Second, registering is not applying for anything. It puts you in the pool that gets invited; it does not submit your name for any particular post.
What the counselling half is for
The "& Counselling" in DE&CC is not decoration. The centres run career guidance, and they are the local point of contact for the skilling and self-employment schemes that otherwise only exist as a website. The Toph Sherkhania fair ran a Mission YUVA awareness session alongside the hiring desks for exactly that reason — a fair reaches people who are looking for a job, and some of them are better served by a training route or a credit-linked enterprise scheme than by another round of applications.
The apprenticeship route, briefly
The nine contracts signed at Toph Sherkhania came through NAPS, which is a different animal from a job offer: a fixed-term training engagement at a registered employer, with a stipend, and a recognised certificate at the end. J&K has been pushing it hard — 15,000 people signed up in a single week earlier this month. If you are two years out of a diploma and stuck, it is frequently the more realistic door, because it asks an employer to take a much smaller risk on you.
What to carry to the next one
Fairs run on document verification, and the candidates who get shortlisted are the ones whose paperwork does not require a second visit:
- Employment Portal registration card
- Matric and 10+2 certificates, plus degree or diploma marksheets and certificate
- Domicile certificate
- Aadhaar
- Category or EWS certificate where it applies
- Several printed copies of a one-page CV, and passport photographs
Nobody publishes the next fair's date far in advance. The way you hear about it is by being on the register — which takes about ten minutes and is, this week, the single highest-return thing an unemployed graduate in Jammu can do.
