A graduating student who is 'employment ready’ is one who has acquired the basic skills that a technical professional should have in place, like, problem solving, communication, interpersonal skills and working knowledge of the technical domain, and therefore, considered ‘ready to be hired’ by the industry. A ‘ready-to-deploy’ graduate is one who is equipped to be deployed on projects and can generate revenue for the company. In the IT / ITES industry, to bring ‘employment ready’ graduates to a state of ‘ready-to-deploy’, most organizations spend around 3-4 months, training them at a cost of over Rs. 2 lac per employee. In tough times like this, that is a cost most companies would like to reduce, and hence, they increasingly scout for ‘ready-to-deploy’ human resource.
Over the last two decades or so, the number of educational institutions imparting technical education has grown by leaps and bounds. However, and even in spite of the sector being over-regulated, many of the newly set up institutions of technical learning have failed in keeping up the education standards set by institutions like the IITs and the NITs. In several colleges, teachers are paid only a fraction of what industry offers to a person with similar qualification and have very few avenues for professional growth. This acts as a deterrent to good talent joining the teaching profession. To compound this problem, often there are no systems in place to reward or punish on the basis of the output quality. Only a few private educational organizations have invested in producing quality output. Also, there is hardly any horizontal movement between industry and academia. Perhaps, given these factors, the huge variation between the expected and the actual quality of technical resources coming out of Indian educational system need not surprise us.
There are fundamental problems at the design level as well. The curricula followed at our universities and colleges are often outdated with hardly any focus on the requirements of the industry. While the fast changing economic scenario has brought new career opportunities to fresh graduates, our courses and programmes have failed to keep pace with these developments. While engineering education is supposed to develop key skills such as problem solving and process manipulation, bulk of learning in our institutions is centered around passing the exams that rely on rote-memorizing the content. This not only kills the joy of learning, but also produces students with sub-optimal skills.
Most people expect the Indian economy to start its recovery by the end of 2009. A study by PurpleLeap, (a pioneer in entry level skill management) projects a real demand of about 70,000 freshers from the IT industry in 2010. Given the excess supply of graduates in 2009, the competition for jobs will be really fierce in 2010. Students who do not meet the expectations of the companies on all parameters are unlikely to get hired.
To avoid being overlooked by potential employers, students of technical courses need to invest in skill building and meet the industry expectation. Primarily, they need to focus on developing transferable skills – skills that are applicable across industries. Transferable skills comprise three broad categories of skills: thinking, behavioural and interaction skills.
Data shows that nearly 70% of our technical graduates do not have the minimum requirement of thinking skills to be employable. For almost half of these students, the gap between the desired and actual levels is so huge that they are considered ‘hard-to-train’ by the industry. On the positive side, an improvement in information processing skills and problem solving skills will double the number of employable graduates. It also means that while communication skill is necessary, it is not sufficient to make a student employable.
Today, there is professional help available from IT Finishing Schools and the like, to help students acquire these skills in a scientific manner under professional guidance. Engineering Colleges themselves are going all out to make sure that they don’t lose out on the shrinking ‘Campus Placement’ numbers. Specific efforts by colleges include; operating active Training & Placement cells, alumni involvement in getting students ready for placements, involving professional organisations in setting up finishing schools inside college campuses etc. Students just need to be aware and care enough to look out for every ‘skill enhancement opportunity’ that is available inside or outside campuses and make optimum use of the same.
Apart from upgrading problem solving, communication and technical skills, it is also a good idea to try and be prepared for specific roles in the industry. It would be a good idea to target a particular role and attain technical and functional expertise for that role itself. For instance, students wanting to make a career in software engineering should make sure that they know the relevant technology (say programming using Microsoft platform) and the processes and tools that they are supposed to work on in their first year of work-life.
Students can overcome the effects of today’s gloomy business environment with an appropriate career plan that involves some level-headed thinking about realistic choices in the short-term, coupled with appropriate investment of resources in acquiring employment skills. Be it in terms of skill enhancement or targeting the right kind of companies, any choice that enhances an individual’s professional value is bound to yield results over a period of time. No recession lasts a life-time!
(The writer Mr. Amit Bansal is the CEO of PurpleLeap)
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