Indore (Madhya Pradesh): “What do you want to do after school?” “Become an engineer…” An obvious answer for many Indians, mostly because of societal pressures and the idea that an engineering degree will give them a stable future. However, only 40% of engineering graduates end up doing an internship and 36% do any projects beyond coursework.
This is citing from the latest National Employability Report. It further added that only 3.84% of engineers are employable in software-related jobs at start-ups.
So, while we are looking forward to start-ups and find it the best way to ‘Make In India’, the lack of employability is a possible reason for start-up failure.
In fact, an IBM Institute study finds that 90% of Indian start-ups fail within the first five years of inception.
“Around 3% of engineers possess new-age skills in areas such as AI, Machine Learning, Data Engineering and Mobile technologies. On an aggregate level, employability in these areas is around 1.5-1.7%,” said the employability report.
The essential skills even though imparted fails to make their place in the engineer’s mind. Perhaps this is due to a lack of interest among students, who get into engineering as a safety net.
In fact, United States has a much higher proportion of engineers, almost four times, but they have good programming skills as compared to India, added the report.
“A much higher percentage of Indian engineers (37.7%) cannot write an error-free code, as compared to China (10.35%),” said the report. The only way out is perhaps training on codes as well AI.
Some initiatives in Indore including engineering companies and start-ups are trying to help out such engineers, who fail to gain the skill.
One such initiative is headed by Er Soumya Upadhyay who runs her start-up. “In the present scenario where budding engineers usually talk about unemployment, lower package or lack of government jobs, they should focus on the skills and hands-on experience in at least initial age of professional life,” she said.
Soumya has been running her venture for the last 7 years and has a team of approximately 15 civil engineers from different engineering colleges. “Exposure towards some real-life projects or hands-on experience makes them more competent and helps them to understand the engineering better and they get groomed as good engineerings and manager,” Soumya said.
Another budding environment is set up by Deepak Sharma, who provides on-hand learning for budding engineers on various projects.
E-café is another college set-up following incubations centres.
