Several engineers are UNEMPLOYABLE

Several engineers are UNEMPLOYABLE

 

Many engineering graduates just don’t have the right skills

 

Rajagopal Sreenivasan

 

   Bangalore may have many engineering students, but it looks as though many of them may be clueless about what they studied. In Bangalore alone, 25,000 engineering graduates are produced every year. But a recent survey shows that more than 30% of them are not skilled enough to be employed. In other words, they don’t know what they’ve studied or why they took it up in the first place.
   There may be several reasons for this such as parental pressure, and so on. But the the Indian education system is one of the prime culprits.
   A bit of investigation reveals the following facts: The teacher invests about two hours per subject to cram in the facts, figures, and derivations concerning it. But very little is being done to introduce the subject in a holistic sense. The relevance of the subject in the real world is hardly being emphasized.
   2. You can’t just blame the teachers. Assuming that the student does take pains to understand the subject on her own, more often than not, she meets a dead-end called exams, which reinforce the adage: curiosity killed the cat. Does more curiosity fetch more marks in a university exam? The answer is obvious.
   The approaches to a possible solution are: 1.Reduce the number of hours. Perhaps about one and half hours must be devoted to dwell on details concerning subject, and spend half an hour explaining its larger purpose and motivate them to study it.
   2. Exams must be made as unpredictable as possible. Standard question patterns in exams is a deterrent to learning. In reality, it’s ignorance that kills the cat but curiosity gets framed. Grades must bank on project work, interviews, interaction with peers and professors and, most importantly, on classroom discussions.
   Prof. S Sadagopan, director, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT_B) says: “Today’s students are well informed and fairly independent. They want engaging education. They prefer learning by doing. They want to solve challenging problems. All these make teaching them very different from what it used to be.”
   (The writer is a first year
   MTech student of IIIT-B)