Innovation key to improve employability of Engineering graduates

Bangalore, Sep 5 (UNI) The problem of low employability rate among the Engineering graduates in India was due to lack of innovation and the students persuing only a few specific areas of excellence, Wipro Chairman Azim Premji said today.

The industry, especially the IT sector, was finding it difficult as only 30 per cent of the graduates passing out from Engineering Colleges were found fit for employment, while the rest needed to undergo intense training programmes to become job fit.

Speaking after announcing the launch of 'Mission 10 X', a product aimed at promoting systemic changes to current teaching-learning paradigms in engineering education commemorating the Teacher's Day, he said the paradox was that despite a large number of Engineering Colleges in the country offering a wider discipline of subjects, the fresh talent coming out of these colleges faced the problem of employability.

They need to equip themselves with this attribute as IT industry followed high standards in selection of its employees and had to cater to customers who seek such high standards, he added.

"The challenges facing us was not producing the high numbers of graduates but to set high standards in education. It is not enough if we just have good curriculum or faculty. Innovation in teaching and education set up can help us to a large extent in improving the employability rate of our graduate youth," he added.

Mr Premji said the country produced 6.5 lakh Engineering graduates every year that included 1.5 diploma holders, compared to 75,000 in the US and 30,000 in Germany, a country known for its engineering orientation.

This growth had been due to supply and demand synthesis. The spending on engineering education had grown over five times during the last ten years. But employability remained a serious problem and there was a need for concerted efforts from the industry, industry organisations and the government, he added.

He said the country should brace itself for the huge challenge from China in deploying the engineering force. China was bring out huge number of talented engineering force year after year into the global market and was emerging as a strong force. India will have to counter this to provide world standard jobs to its engineers both in the country and abroad. For this there need to be a dramatic change in practice in our engineering colleges line merger of technologies, he said.

Wipro's latest product Mission 10 X focussed of this factor and an intense research work done by its innovation team had come out with the 'learning model' that enables a faculty to make a student imbibe 'higher level of understanding' of a subject taught in classrooms along with development of 'key behavioral skills' in parallel, Mr Premji added.

UNI