Students pursuing engineering in India are of opinion that the curriculum for engineering education doesn’t work in sync with the various high profile jobs in construction and IT sector as the academic syllabus is a far cry from real-world situations. Many Indian engineers today do not know enough about the various international standards which are implemented in high-profile projects. The arena of engineering education in India requires a radical up-gradation in order to make it coherent with the real-world situations.
The deplorable condition of Indian IT engineering Market:
As per Ginni Rometty, tech major IBM chief has opined that Indian IT professionals have a significant lack of the needful skill sets at present when a new vista of opportunities galore. She exhorts everyone concerned to take a look at the education system beyond providing and securing degrees. IBM is a 180 billion domestic software industry and it directly employs around 4 million people. She is quite vocal about the situation in India where there are adequate opening for jobs but there is no matching skill sets. She is urging the leaders of education to believe in different things than what was believed in the past. One such point is paying more importance to teaching skills than offering a degree. This is because merely having degrees will keep the young engineers unemployed and compel them to work for a much low salary at the entry level compared to those who are semi-skilled with some experience.
Facts and figures in support of Inadequacy:
You will be surprised to know that just 10 percent of IT engineers have the requisite coding skills. Still worse, only around 3 to 4 percent are proficient to take up roles of a startup engineer or product engineer as per the reports of the survey conducted on April, 2019. Though the situation is more or less the same in the Chinese markets, a much higher percentage of IT engineers in China are capable of writing compilable code, which can be translated to the language read by devices from the authentic programming language. In a recent talent assessment conducted by Aspiring Minds, it was seen that about 4.5 percent of engineers have knowledge of data engineering, 2.5 percent have skills in the area of artificial intelligence and just 5.3 percent can handle wireless technology.
The report also suggests that about 9.9 percent of graduates have the knowledge of producing the correct code or codes with minimal errors while the percent of graduates who are not able to write the correct code is 52.5. Most companies have to depend on about the 37.7 percent engineers who are able to write translatable codes. As a result, the employability of an IT product engineer is around 3.4 percent at the most and a startup engineer is 3.7 percent, a tad bit higher. Thankfully, the employability percentage of technical and network support management personnel is 36.2 percent and that of IT services engineer is 16.3 percent.
Reasons behind the lack of acquiring such skills:
The experience of a recruiter looking for a young graduate who can implement new technology in the concerned segment was quite disappointing as he narrates the steps of the challenges he faced in his endeavor. He said that he neither looked for experience nor supreme knowledge, yet he failed to find someone who could just pick up the advancing technology and move forward. But what could be the possible reason for this?
A search that leads to nowhere- The engineering colleges are churning out whopping numbers of graduates every year, yet there is hardly anybody in the crowd aware of the requirements and improving the skills and expertise on those areas. The recruiters share their horrible experiences in interviewing engineers looking for jobs in the auto industry without knowing the basic difference between a forge and foundry or between blanking and piercing. When they were probed into disclosing what led them to take up engineering as a profession, most of them replied that the admission were almost readily available and moreover, it ensured some sort of employment. Unfortunately, they were not given any hands-on training or any exposure in the real-world industry.
Designing, interpreting and reading drawings are an integral part of any industry and therefore, skills form a fundamental part of it. Most engineers are lacking it although computer-assisted systems are offering considerable amount of flexibility, simplification and versatility to the whole process. Colleges do not teach the students the importance of cleanliness and clarity along with keeping at par with the industry standards.
Jobs that are not relatable with the curriculum- It is true that the present world scenario is making rooms for drones, robots and a lot of other electric vehicles and these are often constructed by students in some of the advanced learning centres. Though these are admirable skills, they are needed to be nurtured with the passage of time. As a result, they are not able to develop their passion for anything that can be turned into a profession. In course of time, when they pass out and try to find a job that would allow them to call themselves IT professionals they cannot find anything that can nurture their passion. Another problem with unavailability of jobs is that good and proficient engineers is that they ultimately land up in administration or banking or other government jobs which they feel would offer a brilliant pay package along with a security till death.
The Indian IT industry is currently utilizing disruptive technologies to improve its condition and it has made considerable growth in 2018 even though there is a persistent shortage of skills coupled with two times attrition. The information technology industry is rejuvenating itself in the national level as our country is empowered with a massive digital transformation potential. According to the experts in the field, digital business is the chariot of growth and contributes to about 1/3rd of revenues of eminent multinational concerns such as Wipro, HCL Technologies, Cognizant, TCS and also mid and small-sized firms are adopting digital platforms for meeting the demands from clients and consumers across the globe.
