90% Indian engineering graduates are not employable – why?

The jury is out for the year 2013, on the quality of the Indian education system. The India employability report by Aspiring Minds, a research firm, has bought out the obvious fact that the quality of the education system in India is, well, abysmal.

But it is the numbers that really dents the point home. Chennai, home to Anna University, one of the largest universities in India with about 400 colleges affiliated to it, has an employability rate of an awful 1%. Even the the state with the highest employability percentage, Delhi, is only at 13%. Bangalore, the so called ‘silicon valley of India’ is at a staggering 3.2%.

Clearly, something is horribly wrong with our technology education system. Here’s a list of things could be wrong -

1. Outdated learning - learning basics is one thing, but learning ancient programming languages, for example, FORTRAN, and not staying in touch with the industry could be one reason why engineering students are not relevant to today’s industry.
2. Theory vs Practice - The current education system poses a chasm between theory and practice. Very little of what is learnt at college can be put into practice in everyday life. Hence, the best performers of the system, which are the kids with the best grades, actually can do very little work and need to be separately trained for it. That’s an expense that not everyone in the industry wants to take.
3. Exam culture - Learning is a continual process, and exams are a way to measure the extent of your learning. It is not the end all. Unfortunately, the CGPA or grade of a graduate is the first filter for employment, and hence students lay emphasis on only the exam and not on learning the subject. This results in weak fundamentals, and hence, industry irrelevance.
4. Lack of exposure - Given that the end goal of technical education is a placement in a college, the amount of exposure given to students about the industry is also very little. It is not until the final year of their college that they begin to understand what the industry really wants. An early exposure to industry can give students an idea of what is relevant in the industry, which they can learn in their own time.
5. Bad career matching - Over the years, the lucrative opportunities that a professional life in the technology industry has provided, has made engineering sciences the de-facto choice for graduate studies. Weather or not the student has the aptitude for the stream is not taken into account, resulting in uninterested engineering candidates, who haven’t taken to their subjects as much as they should have, making them irrelevant to the industry.

Now these are not unknown reasons. Every unemployed engineering graduate in the country knows these reasons, as they have affected his/her life directly. Now they’re playing catch up.

I believe there is quite a lot opportunities for companies like us. These problems have been prevalent for over a decade now and if they still haven’t changed, I don’t expect them to change either. But small teams like our own have been providing very good alternatives for quite a while.

The impact of companies like Khan Academy and Coursera have been phenomenal from a learning perspective. But in the Indian context, education has no meaning without a job. This is the horrible reality that plagues this country. This is a national sentiment and changing it will take at least a century or so.

While learning for learning sake and doing the job that you love to do is utopia, the first step towards it would be to find a middle ground between the ideal and reality. Keep jobs as a priority, but make people attain different goals to achieve it. Put out industry relevant problems and a job opportunity for everyone who can solve the problem within constraints.

Not only is this industry relevant, it also lays emphasis on the importance of learning the basics, as the stronger your foundations, the quicker and better you can solve these programs. You can’t mug up content for these tests; you need to know your skill very well. And the kind of problems that you get to solve is a good measure of what the industry wants.

The problem is fairly easy to solve for engineering and many like us are solving it at scale. Should you be disheartened with the India Employability Survey – Yes. But does that mean there is no hope? – No. Definitely not.

Source:

http://blog.hackerearth.com/2014/02/90-indian-engineering-candidates-employable-why.html

At ELIM Virtual University, we look at this issue from the perspective of the engineering graduates passing out every year and ensure that employability of engineering graduates can definitely be increased to even 100% in the years to come by addressing the issues of enhancing the competencies of our engineering students. What are competencies? Competencies are made up of three basic components: Knowledge, Skills and Attitude (KSA, as it is usually called in Bloom's Taxonomy). Our engineering graduates need to acquire the Knowledge and Skills required by the present industry and have the Attitude to apply the Knowledge and Skills to the real world. For this purpose we have proposed to create a D-Lab (Design Lab) in your home with the help of our kits. In this section we present excerpts from IEEE newsletter on the topic:

Here's That Extra Pair of Robot Arms You've Always Wanted

Developed at  MIT d'Arbeloff Laboratory

Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRLs) are robotic limbs that, when worn, give you more limbs than you'd normally have. In other words, they're not robotic limbs designed to replace biological limbs that you might be missing, but rather robotic limbs designed to augment the number of limbs that you have already.

MIT researchers have been developing SRLs that can help you do stuff that would be annoying, uncomfortable, or impossible to do on your own. Today at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Hong Kong, they presented their latest SRL prototypes, with one model featuring a pair of limbs that spring from your shoulders and another with limbs that extend from your waist.

So the solution to the problem of unemployment/underemployment of our engineering graduates is lack of application of research in industry. Research should begin at home first! But there is Good News for all engineering graduates passing out from 2014/2015 onwards. Design Labs will be set up for specialized courses during Fall 2014 session by ELIM Virtual University.