Over the last decade, there
have been frequent reports of fresh engineers unable to find jobs. Only one in
10 engineering graduates in India is likely to land a job at the end of the
final year. With 1.5 million new engineering graduates entering the market each
year, this is a real problem.
If getting a job in the tech
sector, after spending four years on a B.Tech or B.E. course, is hard, it is
natural to ask why do these courses? It is also important to understand that
the Indian IT sector grew at a time when cost-arbitrage was the primary market
strategy. Today, this has weakened to a point where even on-site workforce is
being scaled down. Simultaneously, the face value of engineering degrees
dropped and the lack of marketing skills became apparent. There was a gaping
hole between what academia taught and what the market demanded
To plug this, new institutions (what
we now call ed-tech) began to emerge; built mostly by industry professionals.
They created market-relevant content and hired experienced professionals to
teach (both part- and full-time). This also opened new avenues for those who
wished to get into the sector without an engineering degree. Companies like
Google are willing to hire professionals with relevant skills even if they don’t
have a tech degree. Today graduates from top engineering colleges are keener to
join product-based companies like Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google
(MAANG) because not only do they pay well, but also offer challenging and
large-scale problems. Traditional engineering colleges are unable to skill
their students to meet this specific demand: work for product companies.
The engineering-based higher education
spaces are also seeing other changes. Traditional heavyweight colleges insist
on hiring those with a doctorate as professors leading to a situation where
teachers do not have any real-world experience. This partly explains the lack
of market-relevant skills in their graduates. However, the introduction of
‘Professor of Practice’ shows that even these colleges have started seeing the
value of having experienced professionals from the industry as part of the
faculty.
But this change has just begun. India
still produces 1.5 million engineers every year. Some large companies continue
to hire B.Tech./B.E. graduates and train them for six months or so before
deploying them. But this model cannot prevail for too long. Instead of a
traditional four-year engineering programme, what young engineers need are
courses more immersed in the industry and relevant in the fast-changing world
of technology.
Rahul Singh
Assistant Professor I
Mechanical Engineering Department
