Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Employability of Engineering Graduates



Preamble
A few years back, when IIM Kozhikode was being instituted, there was a meeting of academics and industrialists held in IIT Delhi with a proportion of approximately 50-50 among the 25 participants. While debating on the academic programs the voice from industry demanded that the graduates should be employable straightaway after the degree program. This was not acceptable to us because no education can be a substitute for industry-specific training.  Employability cannot be defined as the ability of the student to take up the professional job straight after graduation.  What best the university can do is to make the graduate adaptable to different types of job situations after a short term training on the job. There used to be a complaint that engineering education is too theoretical with little or no “practical” component. The present scenario is that a majority of them have no theoretical background either. They are not employable in their domain primarily because the four years in the university did not add any value at all.

The Context
In India, nobody can be blamed for setting the sole objective of education as employment. In spite of lofty ideals set by educationists and institutions on academic excellence, the fact remains that  university students, by and large  crave a lucrative employment on securing a degree. One of the reasons why education in Arts and Science suffered a set-back, and pure learning is unheard of, is this race among students for employment, motivated by their parents and society.  Engineering colleges have  mushroomed  near every bus stop, and the student population had an explosive growth in recent times, whereas the population of good teachers did not grow at the same rate. Colleges are compelled to make do as teachers, with those who are rejected in the job market.  Under the circumstances, it is only natural that a good percentage of engineering students are incapable of going through the rigorous academic program of professional education.  There is always a pressure on the institution to reduce the academic standards to suit the capability of the incoming students.  This inward spiral would ultimately result in producing large numbers of graduates with hollow, or non-content  degree.

On the positive side, industrial  growth of the country has been impressive, particularly in the  IT sector, and employment is plenty.  Today, for most graduates, getting a job is not a problem, while getting the right job is. Of late, employers have become more discerning and very choosy. Gone are the days when a graduate earns a job just by his label. In spite of the unemployment in the country, we find a large number of graduates who are unemployable. It is in this context that this article on Employability in presented here.

Employability :
Employability is a person’s capability of gaining initial employment, maintaining employment and obtaining new employment.

A graduate cannot be employed just because he has a degree in a specific area.  There are three essential attributes the person  should have, namely, Knowledge, Skills and abilities.

     Traditionally, Universities and Colleges concentrate on imparting knowledge, and believe that the student would acquire the skills himself, and that the abilities are inborn qualities. In the modern context, the Institution has to be proactive in imparting all the three requirements to make a student employable.  However, the techniques adopted for imparting knowledge, skills and abilities ought not to be the same.  In general it is thought that education brings about knowledge, vocational  training, the skills and life skill training, the abilities.

Knowledge : Acquisition Strategies
            Acquisition of knowledge has at least five different levels as follows :

-         Familiarity with the topic
-         Memory and reproduction
-         Analysis
-         Synthesis
-         Creativity

Of the  40 theory courses and 16 practical courses done  in B.Tech. curriculum, one does not expect  the student to reach the level of creativity in all of them.  But the tragedy of today is that, learning of all subjects is reduced to the level of memorizing and reproducing it in the examination.  Even in courses where the student should reach the level of synthesis and creativity (like design subjects and project) certain shortcuts  are employed to prevent the student from going anywhere above the level of  memory and reproduction. In fact this is the tragedy of our educational system in the  acquisition of knowledge.  An employer expects the student to have a domain knowledge. An electronics engineer should know electronics. There should be a correlation between the label and content.

There is a perception among many employed people that the job requirement has nothing to do with what they learnt in college, and therefore, college imparts useless knowledge.  This is true in the case of many people who enter the profession and do not grow in their technical domain.  The rules of thumb they learn on the job attain predominance over fundamental knowledge and they think that these rules of thumb are enough, and should replace fundamental knowledge and education. They try to eulogise their view by projecting their own theoretical ignorance as “Practical experience”(Courtesy: Dr. KBM Nambudiripad). However, it is also important to appreciate that bookish knowledge alone does not make a person employable. Theoretical  knowledge, complemented by practical skills should form the “Domain Knowledge” of any professional specialization.  There are many who think that Theoretical and Practical are opposites;  they are not. The opposite of “Practical” is not theoretical, but “Impractical”.

Acquisition of Skills
Skills can be classified into two categories namely (a) skill for identification and solution of problems (b) Technical skills to perform routine work efficiently.  The first type of skill is of a higher intellectual order whereas the second is close to the labour skill.  Therefore, the first type of skill is closely associated with acquisition of knowledge.  The second type depends  on the level of training.

Employers generally complain that Universities and Colleges emphasize more on knowledge and less on skills.  The universities in turn argue that they cannot reduce themselves to training schools for a specific industry.  Universities should produce graduates who can adapt themselves to a variety of situations and cannot lose generality in imparting of knowledge and skills.  The industry, on the other hand should provide adequate training to adapt the graduates to their specific situations, realizing  that university education is not a substitute for on the job training.

On the part of the Universities, the whole concept of “Practical Classes” should change.  Today it has deteriorated to a level where the student gains almost nothing from such classes.

Abilities
Today, institutions spend a considerable amount of money and effort on preparing the students to face interviews, thinking that this barrier is the most difficult one to get across.  Abilities have different components, many are intrinsic and quite a few acquired.

Intrinsic Abilities include learning ability, initiative, confidence, passion a sense of ownership, team spirit, organizational skill, attitude, values and ethics.  Acquired abilities include communication skills, time management, stress management, critical thinking, group discussion and etiquettes. These are not mutually exclusive sets and there is quite a lot of overlap among them.

Conclusion

A major factor that one often ignores is the change in attitude of the student community over the years. When jobs were few and education scarce the competition was healthier and most people wanted to do well. Large scale failures were unheard of, in engineering colleges, primarily because only the cream of the student community could aspire to reach an engineering college. Now there are more engineering colleges than Arts colleges and polytechnics. A large percentage are those who are there only for the label of a degree. This attitude is endorsed by many parents too. There is a strong belief that getting a B.Tech degree “somehow” will fetch a well paid job. Incompetence of teachers and greed of managements are accelerating this downward slide. In today’s scenario it is foolhardy to expect all graduates to be employable. My experience inside and outside the classrooms puts the average employable percentage around thirty. If an institution is able to get jobs for more than 30% of its graduates I would say they are doing very well.

If the proportion of employable graduates has to improve quite a lot of effort is needed at different levels of School Education. By removing evaluation and examinations at the end of every year, allowing every student to move to the higher class and finally diluting the SSLC examination to ensure 100% pass, the initiative of the less endowed children has been drained out. Such children are rendered incapable of facing any academic challenge in higher education, using their intelligence. When they reach professional colleges (which they surely do, due to availability of seats) they expect to pass without ever working for it. Finally the political pressure from students, parents and governments compel institutions to dilute their programs and churn out worthless graduates with labels and non-content qualifications. It needs tremendous political will to stem the rot.

Post Script:

·        Knowledge without skill and ability is useless
·        Skill without knowledge and ability is stale
·        Ability without knowledge and skill is hollow