Are Our Engineers Ready For Industrial Revolution 4.0?

BW Businessworld organised Higher Education event on Friday (1 September) in Bengaluru. The event was attended by top notch people from the education sector.

At the event, the panel discussion started with an emphasis on technical education. The theme of the discussion was 'Engineers for Industrial Revolution 4.0'. Dr Sasangan Ramanathan, Dean College of Engineering, Amrita College, Coimbatore moderated the session with the panellists expressing their viewpoints and suggestions around the topic.

Professor S. Ramachandran, Vice Chancellor, Hindustan University, gave more insight about Industry 4.0 and said, “Industry 4.0 facilitates a lot of smart factories. It works on six key design principles – Interoperability, Service orientation, Virtualisation, Decentralisation, Real time capability, and Modularity.”

Dr VSS Kumar, Vice Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Kakinada, said, “In the university system, one needs to accept the changes. We have to accept the e-learning process of the education system too. Online education has become mandatory now under the government of India. However, this did not give much success. We wanted to offer cyber security, big data, and other technology as courses curriculum in our institution. 

Kumar added, "we began our search throughout the globe for faculty. The success rate grew about 35 per cent after that. People these days are not focusing on skill development but we have to train them to get more entrepreneurs.”

Addressing to the need for changes in pedagogy, Dr Yogesh Kumar Bhatt, VP – IT Education & Training, Manipal Global Education said, “We educational institutions exist only because we want to make students employed and employable throughout their lives. Just knowing about IoT, cloud, etc is not enough. You need to make them learn the skill.

He said, "It is more important for them to focus on not just technology but on the customer too. Platform thinking is not to reinvent the wheel but build on that. All this can happen only if we are re-skill oriented people. Problem-solving is a key skill. But today, the world has gone beyond that. It is now about problem finding.”