Ever wondered what do the heads of the country’s top engineering colleges think about the debate around employability of Indian engineering graduates? According to a report in Economic Times, the IIT directors have spoken about the issue of employability and said that there is indeed a real concern about employability because of the large number of engineering graduates that India produces every year, outdated curriculum, poor teaching infrastructure and shortage of good faculty.
The IIT directors have also termed the numbers thrown up by some surveys as exaggerated.
Recently, Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) Chairman, Deepak Parekh had also claimed that an average of 1.5 million graduate engineers pass out every year, but four-fifth of them were not employable due to lack of adequate skills.
The onus of bringing out quality engineers lies not on the students, most of who come into the system with the intention to learn, but on the institutes, says Indranil Manna, director at IIT-Kanpur.
The main problems, said Gautam Biswas, director at IIT-Guwahati, were inappropriate curriculum, poor syllabi, inadequate laboratory infrastructure and a shortage of quality human resources for teaching.
The reactions came after a recent study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, claimed that 95 per cent of engineers in India are unfit for coding jobs. Owing to the shortage of talent in IT and data science, the majority of them are unfit to pursue any software development jobs.
Over 36,000 engineering students from IT related branches of over 500 colleges took Automata — a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skills — and over 2/3 could not even write code that compiles. The study further noted that while more than 60 per cent candidates cannot even write code that compiles, only 1.4 per cent can write functionally correct and efficient code.
