How do we bridge the skill gap of engineers?

Each year, 15 lakh engineers graduate in India but only a small fraction of them get a job with a decent salary.

The reason? There’s a clear and growing skill gap between engineering education and the rapid pace of technological change.

And this skill gap is a direct result of our obsession with textbook learning, with a focus on grades instead of real-world experience.

So when employers arrive at campuses, they are often disappointed. Many of them are ready to pay good money for good talent, but they often realise that good grades don’t always translate to a great hire.

So it isn’t just a lack of adequate jobs, but also the lack of employable candidates.

While some effort is being made to change this trend, the onus lies both with educational institutions and employers. Here’s a simple blueprint that all parties involved can follow to bridge this gap:

• Make industry internships and training a non-negotiable part of the curriculum. Mandating a minimum amount of industry training and assessment about practical skills should be a condition for students to graduate.

• Ensure on-campus practical training through the execution of live projects. These could be linked to the subjects that the student is studying that semester.

• Provide mentorship and counselling from industry practitioners to help students better understand their possible growth trajectories through reviews and assessments.

• Allow students to work on projects that can become real world businesses and solve big problems right from the campus. Big tech companies like Google have allotted employees time to work on their own personal projects.

With the rise of the start-up culture, some enterprising students are brave enough not to wait for graduation / certificates to embark on their entrepreneurial journey. Embracing this tectonic shift in mindset can be beneficial both for the institution and student.

• Frequently updating the curriculum to include new age subjects like Artificial Intelligence / Machine learning, or even basic knowledge of software / programming languages and robotics is critical.
Even with this blueprint, the biggest challenge is a change in the mindset.

The solution is to think from the perspective of the employers. If you were a recruiter, what would you prefer?

Students with a couple of internships and great grades?

Or someone with average grades but two years of industry experience, and a glowing letter of recommendation from the places they have worked at?

Classroom education is increasingly seen as something that hurts careers, instead of building them. It is time we changed that.

(The author is the Managing Director of a digital consulting firm)