Over 80 pc Indian engineers unemployable, lack new-age technological skills: Report

The employability of Indian engineers continues to be low as over 80 per cent of them are unemployable for any job in the knowledge economy, says a report.

According to a report by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, only 3.84 per cent of engineers in the country have the technical, cognitive and linguistic skills required for software-related jobs in start-ups.

Moreover, only 3 per cent of engineers have new-age technological skills in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science and mobile development. The employability in new-age jobs is pegged at an average 1.7 per cent.

The report said the reasons for low employability and states that only 40 per cent engineering graduates do an internship, while a mere 7 per cent students do multiple internships. Also, only 36 per cent do projects beyond their curriculum.

It added that engineering discipline in India is very theoretical as 60 per cent faculty doesn't talk about application of concepts in the industry and only 47 per cent of the engineers attend any industry talk.

"We find that a low proportion of engineers take up projects beyond curriculum and do internships. Further, there is a lack of faculty talking about industry application of concepts in class or students getting exposure through industry talks.

"These need to be remedied by aligning incentives of all stakeholder, building capacity and gamification," Aspiring Minds Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Varun Aggarwal said.

The report, which is based on a research conducted on engineering students from India, the US and China, found that the number of engineers in the US who know how to code is almost four times than Indian engineers.

Though Indian engineers show better potential than Chinese engineers in writing correct code, the proportion of engineers who cannot write compliable code in India is almost three times the Chinese engineers who cannot do so, according to the report.