mkrishna100
Active member
90% Indian engineering graduates are not employable – why?
http://blog.hackerearth.com/2014/02/90-indian-engineering-candidates-employable-why.html
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. We at HackerEarth decided to pen down these problems and here’s a list of things could be wrong –
Outdated learning – learning basics is one thing, but learning ancient programming languages, for example, FORTRAN, and not staying in touch with the industry could be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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://blog.hackerearth.com/2014/02/90-indian-engineering-candidates-employable-why.html
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. We at HackerEarth decided to pen down these problems and here’s a list of things could be wrong –
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
