Why 80% engineers are unemployable?

When career assessment and research solutions firm Aspiring Minds first published its National Employability Report in 2010, it was shocking to learn that 82 percent IT engineers in India were found unfit for any job.

Nearly a decade later, the National Employability Report 2019 is no different. It says '80 per cent Indian engineers are not fit for any job in the knowledge economy.' The findings -- based on data collected from 170,000 students from across 750 plus colleges in India -- states that only a handful of Indian engineers possess coding expertise.

Stressing on the lack of industry relevant curriculum and exposure, the NER reported how students were 'trapped in a college bubble.' 'Sixty percent of faculty do not discuss how engineering concepts apply to industry,' the report said.

Indian graduates continue to face a skills gap and are unfit for employment, according to the latest Aspiring Minds report. What reasons do you attribute for this?

There is really no macro change in India's higher education policy in the last decade, or even more. Any policy needs to encourage that the higher education sector works like a market -- universities and institutions are run by professional management, educated individuals and global corporations are incentivised and excited to get into the sector, there is healthy competition which leads to improvement in quality of education.

The government needs to play a role in making this market efficient by creating transparent information about the quality of institutions, so that the parents and students choose colleges based on real factors rather than marble flooring, chandeliers and foreign faces.

Rating of colleges need to be based on outcomes, such as performance of faculty/students in standardised tests, employer rating, than input parameters like number of labs, faculty, area, etc.

Ranking of colleges on these parameters should be widely made available, which helps parents/students make the right choices and creates incentives for colleges to improve on these parameters.

In the last decade, lot of efforts have been made, which have created some centres of excellence. However, this has really made no sizable difference in aggregate.

The government needs to take higher education as a priority and understand that it has a direct short term and long term impact on economic growth.

In your opinion, where are students going wrong? What can they do to reverse the trend?

Honestly, it is not the students's mistake. When you have such wide unemployability, it is the system which has failed the students and not otherwise.

My suggestion to students is that they really concentrate on learning and not study for the exams. Most exams in Indian universities are rote-learning based and really do not test concepts or application. This puts the onus of finding the right direction and learning, squarely on the students.

Free online courses from the best universities in the world come to the rescue. Students should actively use these resources to further their learning and also testing themselves.

They should involve themselves into doing projects, where they build things from scratch. In engineering, you learn by doing. Doing proper internships is another great way to learn.

Also, there is a big belief among students that what they are learning in the curriculum is not relevant or used at work. There is nothing more untrue than that. The basic concepts of engineering have broadly not changed in the last three decades, even though there are some tweaks to it.

Knowing the curriculum well, and understanding the concepts is key for success. My general suggestion to students is that they should just plan to put in 7 to 8 productive hours every day, in whatever interests them.

By productive hours, I mean hours spent in learning or creating something that interests them. This will still leave them enough time for movies, gossip, and what not. But, if they can spend those 7 to 8 hours in learning or creating something, it will automatically solve all problems.

How can graduates be job-ready at the end of college?

There is a simple framework for this. The industry looks for four kinds of skills: Language, cognitive skills (aptitude/problem solving), functional skills (programming/circuit design) and soft skills. NER-2019 reveals that there is a gap in pretty much all these skills. For instance, 50% of students lose out because of lack of English language skills, while only 15% to 20% have the functional skills the companies are looking for.

Functional skills are very much part of the college curriculum, but as I said that college exams and most of the times, teaching is rote learning based. Thus, students do not understand concepts and are unable to apply them.

For example, only 5% engineers from IT and IT-related branches can write a 15 line program to solve a given task.

Again, there is enough evidence, that application-based learning, projects, etc improve cognitive and problem solving skills. Such learning should start in the early years. Science says there is scope for huge improvement in these skills right after adolescence.

Language is developed both during school and later. Colleges should provide programmes to improve language skills, also, because all engineering curriculum and material in India is in English. When the student enters college, there should be tests to find a student's gap in language and cognitive skills and bridge programmes should be offered in the first year.

For soft skills, companies are mostly just looking for a learning attitude and basic work discipline. They are happy to train candidates further. One area, where the gap will amplify in the days to come, is new age skills.

Skills in areas of AI, mobile, product management, data engineering, etc are going to be in big demand. These are neither covered in curriculum nor do we have trained faculty in these areas. In fact, India has never been a participant in new age technologies -be it the Internet, mobile, and now AI.