Finishing schools for 'unemployable' Engg graduates from summer

New Delhi, Feb 7 (UNI) Engineering graduates trained in disciplines not having much scope for jobs can now migrate to the Information Technology sector or other ones which are short of skilled manpower.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development has taken a decision to start 'finishing schools' of short duration for such graduates to make them employable in the new sectors, Secretary Technical Education Ravi Mathur told UNI.

The graduates who come from less preferred disciplines like metallurgy etc will get about three-months schooling at seven NITs and one IIT.

Prof Juhjhunwala of IIT Madras will be coordinating this programme.

The decision to start such courses has been taken on a NASSCOM report which said that about 30 per cent of engineering graduates were not fit for immediate employment after coming out of colleges.

''This is the first time that the government was doing it, though private companies gave fresh training to their recruited engineers,'' said Mr Mathur.

The finishing schools will start functioning from this summer but the number of graduates for retraining is yet to be decided, he said.

''We want the initial exercise to be a bench mark. The number of students will be increased later after assessing the results,'' said Mr Mathur.

The concept of finishing schools was presented to the Ministry set up by it in the wake of the NASSCOM report.

Mr Mathur said the fact of direct unemployability of engineers, highlighted in the report, needed a solution which had two aspects.

First, for a longtime solution, one needed improvement in the quality of education both by upgrading teaching and infrastructure.

But the situation required that something had to be done on a short-term basis to make the existing graduates employable, hence the decision to start finishing schools, he said.

Mr Mathur said the work on the designing of courses for the 'migrated' graduates was going on and he had called a meeting of IIT experts at Jaipur on Febraury 10 in this connection.

UNI