5 Reasons Why Engineers Are Becoming Unemployable
Engineering is the most preferred career choice for millions of students in India which hardly comes as a surprise for a nation that is one of the leading “producers of engineers” in the world. However, the hard-hitting fact is that a large of engineering graduates are failing to get placements.
In India, almost 6000+ technology and engineering institutes produce around 1.5 million engineers.However, as per the survey conducted by National Employability Report, more than 80% of engineers are unemployed for years. Talking about engineering graduates, about 97% of them want to work in core engineering domains, while only 7% of them are eligible to do so.
So, now the big question is, why engineering graduates have all of a sudden become “unemployable”? Let’s talk about that in greater detail.
Several reasons could be attributed for this sudden decline in job opportunities for engineering freshers which include global economic slowdown, rapid flourishing of engineering institutes in the country and ease of approval for setting up engineering institutes from nodal authorities like AICTE, course curriculum is not equipped to cater to evolving industry requirements.
- Quality of Education: It is one of the major factors responsible for making most of the engineers ‘unemployable’. Decade old teaching techniques and obsolete learning programs with lack of proper guidance make the students unaware of the essentials methodologies of the discipline. Furthermore, it has been observed that most tutors and professors are in a hurry to finish the syllabus rather than helping out students to understand the core concepts and topics.
The management doesn’t even care about research and projects. Besides some of the engineering institutessuch as IITs, BITS, and NITS, most of them suffer from under-qualified faculties, deteriorating infrastructure, outdated laboratories, etc. - Lack of Skills: The increasing divide between the skillsets required by the industry and the skillsets imparted by the existing academic curriculum has resulted in declining placement trends in various engineering colleges. Most engineering institutes don’t pay much heed to conducting research projects or workshops which are very important to upgrade the technical skillsets and acquire new skills which has the become the need of the hour considering the dynamic nature of engineering professions.
One such example is the IT sector which at the moment requires candidates to be well versed with technologies like robotics, process automation, cloud analytics, etc. Moreover, these graduates are expected to possess multifaceted knowledge to be able to understand business domain besides the technical know-how. - Theory vs. Practical Applications: Another major problem linked to the above-mentioned issues is lack of practical exposure to students within their academic curriculum. In the fast-paced world of engineering jobs, where existing skillsets become obsolete in no time and companies expect the suitable candidates to require minimal formal training and exposure before they start delivering results, this gap is likely to aggravate the situation which is already worsening.
Interestingly, in a survey conducted by the employability assessment firm Aspiring Minds as many as 95% of engineering graduates failed to meet the basic requirement of coding. - Gender Inequality: It may not seem obvious that this is directly related to quality of engineers produced by India but this gender divide is a major setback when the country has almost 10 lakh new engineering aspirants every year. Most parents in India still have a strong bias while pushing their daughter to pursue engineering if compared to other streams. If one skims through the MHRD’s report for higher education enrolment, there is a gap of almost 40% between boys and girls when it comes to enrolment in B.E./B Tech courses.
- Too Many: Last but not the least, rapidly increasing number of engineering graduates produced by India every year is a major cause behind the rising unemployability. Almost 10-11 lakh candidates appear for JEE Main and around 1.5 million engineers are produced every year, resulting in a massive shortage of employment opportunities. Coupling this with issues such as inappropriate academic curriculum, lack of quality infrastructure and a huge deficit in terms of human resources required for mentoring these budding engineers, it hardly comes as a surprise to see FICCI’s joint report with Ernst and Young 2016 report which claims almost 93% MBA graduates and 80% engineering graduates are unemployable.
One can clearly discern the immediate rectification measures and improvement necessary to clean this fine mess created by our country’s education system.
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