According to a new report, 80 per cent of India’s engineers are not employable in the knowledge economy and that India’s higher education sector is need of fundamental changes rather than the ad-hoc changes that have been implemented over the years.

“80 per cent of engineers are not employable for any job in the knowledge economy. This is quite disheartening...Micro-interventions may help create isolated pockets of competence, but they do little for higher education or the larger economy as a whole,” said the report.

The report, titled ‘National Employability Report — Engineers 2019’ was published by Aspiring Minds, a job skills assessments company. According to the report, only 2.5 per cent of India's engineers possesses skills in artificial intelligence (i.e., machine learning and data science) required by the industry.

The report shows that only 3.84 per cent of Indian engineers possesses the technical, cognitive and linguistic skill set to be able to perform software-related jobs in start-up companies.

Furthermore, only 3 per cent of engineers have acquired modern tech skills to be able to get involved in new booming areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science.

The reasons for such abysmal rates of employability of engineers in various kinds of jobs have also been highlighted in the report. One major issue is that only about 40 per cent of engineering graduates take up internships; just 7 per cent of engineering students had done more than one internship.

Another problem is that faculty in India are still deeply rooted in the theoretical approach to teaching, with some 60 per cent of them not training their students about the real-world application of concepts.

Though Indian engineers fare better than their Chinese counterparts, they pale in comparison to the American ones. “Good coding skills (the ability to write functionally correct code) are possessed by 4.6% of Indian job applicants, 2.1% of Chinese candidates and 18.8% of the US candidates in the IT and software industries.”

The report also claimed that US engineers are four times better than Indian engineers in coding.

“This means that India must do more to educate its general population in proper coding skills...The government of India needs to prioritize higher education and undertake long-term policy interventions in the next 5-10 years to ameliorate the low rate of engineering employability,” the report added.

94 Per Cent

Echoing similar sentiments, CP Gurnani, CEO & MD of Tech Mahindra had earlier stated in an interview to Times Of India (TOI) that 94 per cent of engineering graduates in India were not fit for hiring. "The top 10 IT companies take only 6% of the engineering graduates. What happens to the remaining 94%?" he had said.

Also Read: Engineering India’s Engineers: Setting Free Young Minds

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