90% Indian engineering graduates are not employable - why? - Hacker...

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http://blog.hackerearth.com/2014/02/90-indian-engineering-candidate...

90% Indian engineering

graduates are not employable
why?
February 4, 2014 by Raghu Mohan

The jury is out for the year 2013, on the quality of the Indian
education system. The India employability report by Aspiring
Minds, a research rm, has bought out the obvious fact that the
quality of the education system in India is, well, abysmal.
But it is the numbers that really dents the point home. Chennai,
home to Anna University, one of the largest universities in India
with about 400 colleges aliated to it, has an employability rate
of an awful 1%. Even the the state with the highest employability
percentage, Delhi, is only at 13%. Bangalore, the so called silicon
valley of India is at a staggering 3.2%.
Clearly, something is horribly wrong with our technology
education system. We at HackerEarth decided to pen down
these problems and heres a list of things could be wrong
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90% Indian engineering graduates are not employable - why? - Hacker...

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http://blog.hackerearth.com/2014/02/90-indian-engineering-candidate...

1. Outdated learning learning basics is one thing,

but learning ancient programming languages, for
example, FORTRAN, and not staying in touch with the
industry could be one reason why engineering
students are not relevant to todays industry.
2. Theory vs Practice The current education system
poses a chasm between theory and practice. Very
little of what is learnt at college can be put into
practice in everyday life. Hence, the best performers
of the system, which are the kids with the best
grades, actually can do very little work and need to be
separately trained for it. Thats an expense that not
everyone in the industry wants to take.
3. Exam culture Learning is a continual process, and
exams are a way to measure the extent of your
learning. It is not the end all. Unfortunately, the CGPA
or grade of a graduate is the rst lter for
employment, and hence students lay emphasis on
only the exam and not on learning the subject. This
results in weak fundamentals, and hence, industry
irrelevance.
4. Lack of exposure Given that the end goal of
technical education is a placement in a college, the
amount of exposure given to students about the
industry is also very little. It is not until the nal year
of their college that they begin to understand what
the industry really wants. An early exposure to
industry can give students an idea of what is relevant
in the industry, which they can learn in their own
time.

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90% Indian engineering graduates are not employable - why? - Hacker...

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http://blog.hackerearth.com/2014/02/90-indian-engineering-candidate...

5. Bad career matching Over the years, the lucrative

opportunities that a professional life in the
technology industry has provided, has made
engineering sciences the de-facto choice for graduate
studies. Weather or not the student has the aptitude
for the stream is not taken into account, resulting in
uninterested engineering candidates, who havent
taken to their subjects as much as they should have,
making them irrelevant to the industry.
Now these are not unknown reasons. Every unemployed
engineering graduate in the country knows these reasons, as
they have aected his/her life directly. Now theyre playing catch
up.
I believe there is quite a lot opportunities for companies like us.
These problems have been prevalent for over a decade now and
if they still havent changed, I dont expect them to change either.
But small teams like our own have been providing very good
alternatives for quite a while.
The impact of companies like Khan Academy and Coursera have
been phenomenal from a learning perspective. But in the Indian
context, education has no meaning without a job. This is the
horrible reality that plagues this country. This is a national
sentiment and changing it will take at least a century or so.
While learning for learning sake and doing the job that you love
to do is utopia, the rst step towards it would be to nd a middle
ground between the ideal and reality. Keep jobs as a priority, but

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90% Indian engineering graduates are not employable - why? - Hacker...

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http://blog.hackerearth.com/2014/02/90-indian-engineering-candidate...

make people attain dierent goals to achieve it. Put out industry
relevant problems and a job opportunity for everyone who can
solve the problem within constraints.
Not only is this industry relevant, it also lays emphasis on the
importance of learning the basics, as the stronger your
foundations, the quicker and better you can solve these
programs. You cant mug up content for these tests; you need to
know your skill very well. And the kind of problems that you get
to solve is a good measure of what the industry wants.
The problem is fairly easy to solve for engineering and many like
us are solving it at scale. Should you be disheartened with the
India Employability Survey Yes. But does that mean there is no
hope? No. Denitely not.
Are you participating in the HackerEarth frontend hiring challenge?
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