Industry experts have been reiterating that only about 18 to 20 out of 100 qualified engineers are industry-ready and are in a position to be recruited. And the reason that they have been citing is the skill gap between what is being taught in the colleges and the industry requirement.
To bridge that gap, the State government has partnered with the German multi-national Siemens to start a ‘Siemens Centre of Excellence’ at Andhra University College of Engineering (AUCOE). The centre is almost ready and is likely to be formally inaugurated by Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu shortly.
The state-of-the-art centre of excellence is like a finishing school and it not only gives a practical exposure to the students from almost all branches of engineering such as mechanical, ECE, EEE, electrical, CSE, IT and instrumentation, but also bridges the skill gap that industries look for.
The exposure will make the candidates industry-ready, said Principal of AUCOE P.S. Avadhani.
The centre has come up in four blocks occupying about 20,000 sft and Andhra University has spent about ₹5 crore in refurbishing the buildings.
The total investment of Siemens will be around ₹300 crore and already a bulk of it has been spent from its CSR funds, said AU Vice-Chancellor G. Nageswara Rao.
‘Hub-and-spoke’ model
The MoU is for 10 years and Siemens apart from investing the funds, will take care of the centre including training the faculty for the first two years, and AU has to take over thereafter. Siemens has given the establishment, training and maintenance of the Centre to Pune-based project design and consultancy firm Design Tech.
The centre is being set-up under the ‘hub-and-spoke’ model. While the Centre in AU will be hub, the spokes will be the centres at JNTU-Kakinada, JNTU-Anantapur, Sri Venkateswara University- Tirupati, Siddhartha Engineering College- Vijayawada and Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology – Guntur and is coming up under the aegis of the AP State Skill Development Corporation.
The centre at Andhra University will have about 15 labs such as product design and validation lab, advanced manufacturing lab, test and optimisation lab.
