The Indian employability Debate

I read an article on India Knowldge@Wharton, which I found interesting. I'm pasting an extracted part of the whole article here and would like to debate on the topic whether Indian Engineers are employable.

The employability issue is the focus of a heated debate in India, with strong arguments from both sides. The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) has published a study saying that only 25% of information technology (IT) graduates are employable. This has drawn a strong reaction from the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the government's accreditation agency. According to the AICTE, every year, one million engineering graduates and diploma holders are added to the workforce. If the number of unemployed engineers was anywhere near what Nasscom claims, "there would be civil war," AICTE chairman S.S. Mantha told the media recently.

The IT sector has been the biggest recruiter in recent years and has attracted many studies. A report by Aspiring Minds, a Gurgaon-based employability assessment firm, highlighted the skills gap, particularly in the product space. According the report, titled "The National Employability Report, Engineering Graduates, Annual Report-2012," although India produces more than 500,000 engineers annually, only 2.68% meet the skill requirements of the IT products sector. The report estimated that nearly 92% of engineering graduates in India lack computer programming and algorithms skills and around 56% lack soft skills and cognitive skills.

The report further noted that only a very small percentage of engineers have the competence to apply engineering mathematics to solve problems. "There is a clear and measurable distinction between the talent required to develop IT products vis-à-vis typical IT services talent. While we observe employable talent is spread across all kinds of colleges, building India's prowess in IT products would require significant focus and investment in training and evaluating students in core technology," Himanshu Aggarwal, CEO of Aspiring Minds said in the report.

Sanjay Modi, managing director of online recruitment firm Monster.com for India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, suggests that there is a lack of adequate communication and collaboration between the government, academia and industry in India. "For instance, while business has changed drastically in the past 10 years, the curriculum in educational institutions is the same as it was a couple of decades ago. And the sheer process of bringing in any change in the curriculum is so tedious that it simply gets bogged down," says Modi. "What is needed is a strategy of three Es -- education, employability and employment. What we have to focus on first is education. This will lead to higher employability."

In an earlier India Knowledge@Wharton article, Manish Sabharwal, chairman of TeamLease Services, a leading human resource services provider, pointed out that skill development is only one part of the solution. Sabharwal noted: "There are three problems in the current Indian system: matching supply and demand, repairing supply for demand and preparing supply for demand. What we are all focusing on right now in terms of employability ... is only the repair part. This is a low-hanging fruit. But this repair pipeline will run dry if the prepare pipeline, by way of education reforms, is not fixed. And that is something that the government and academia need to work on."

Original article can be found here -> #-Link-Snipped-#