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.
Changes
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.
The writer is Senior Vice-President, Scaler, and head of Scaler School of Technology.
