Are Engineering Students Industry Ready?

Aditya Bhushan Verma Jun 22, 2019

Every year millions of engineering students graduate from Engineering colleges and more than 50% of them remain unplaced.

97% of the students want a job in IT/Internet/Product or core sector, however, only 3 per cent students have the adequate skills to get into core software jobs or product companies.

Don’t be surprised by these figures! This is the reality of the engineering students in India. Currently, there are 3242 engineering colleges in India under AICTE offering undergraduate & postgraduate courses from which around 1.5 million students are graduating every year but the gloomy state of engineering education in India have made it very tough for the industry to get the right candidates since they do not possess the required skills to be employed

Companies are spending around 3-6 months on hired students to make them employable so that they can start delivering the required output. For a growing country like India, engineering youth not being employable or not able to match the employability criterion may worsen economic and social conditions in the coming future.

The underlying reasons for the un-employability of the students are:

Deliverability & Syllabus content

Technology is growing at a very swift rate & population across the globe has to match it up to be ready for the future & so does education in colleges. There is a huge gap in what the market is demanding & what is being taught to the students. Syllabus in colleges has not been changed for long. We are still following old style of teaching and almost no emphasis is laid upon deliverability & content which play a crucial role in the understanding for the students. To cope up with the demanding needs, the content has to be upgraded regularly & new innovative methods of teaching & deliverability should be introduced. Same methods may not work for all the students since they don’t have similar aptitude & intellect levels.

Dearth of Improvement, Innovation & Research

Many engineering colleges except for some handful of them are not having any research of innovation wing which would make students ready for the next upcoming. The graduation dissertation of students is almost similar for every passing batch which shows a big lack of push in innovation and new projects.

Quality & quantity of teachers

Teaching as a choice of profession in India comes after many professions & area of expertise. For instance there is very less population of engineering students who after graduating aim to pick PhD and many a time it’s their last pick which does not come as a choice but as a last option. Initially, it’s either a multinational firm, top IT Company, new generation startups, MBA etc. Quality of teachers is hampered due to this since teaching does not come as a natural choice or out of passion.

Lack of guidance from Industry individuals

Mentorship from the people already in the industry will have a huge positive impact on students. Industry outside the college is almost like a black box for many students. In Prepbytes we have talked to around 5000+ college students from more than 300 different colleges and we found that they are seeking for guidance & mentorship so that they can prepare better for the IT/Software industry. They lack understanding in making a better choice to what to learn & how to make their problem-solving skills better.

How the situation can be made better?

Education in engineering colleges has to be at par with the advancements happening across the globe and more emphasis should be laid upon implementation post-theoretical learning.

Problem-solving skills & more emphasis on making fundamentals clear is something which can lay a very solid foundation for the students during their 4 years of college and can be helpful in not only getting jobs but also to perform better in jobs.

If colleges do not have adequate resources to provide courses or programs which is in demand by the industry they can recommend or collaborate with e-learning companies today so that students can have better access to quality education through MOOCs and other online material. All they need is guidance from inhouse faculty to make the right choice of the courses & make best out of it.

Colleges should allocate funds for innovation & research and projects should be taken from the growing companies making the problem statement relevant and students should be motivated & pushed towards solving them by making them understand its importance.