Issue of employability

Pervin Malhotra

Q.Our son who is studying in the final year of BTech is worried about his future. Can you please explain why so many of our IT graduates are unemployed despite the fact that IT and CS are taught in just about every engineering college?

— Gauri Thacker

A.For the simple reason that the Indian IT industry wants skills. If you’ve been following reports in the papers, survey after survey of IT students graduating from engineering colleges across the country reveals that most of them lack programming & algorithm skills, domain skills, analytic & quantitative skills, English speaking & comprehension skills, soft & cognitive skills. So as in everything else, quantity is no guarantor of quality. They are two different things.

The low employability that you mention is actually a collective outcome of our poor academic standards and an increasing demand for skilled employees -- resulting in a drastic skill gap in the country.

Corporates seek candidates who have their basic skills in place and don’t require much training upon recruitment. But the onus has now shifted onto the industry to groom candidates on learnability, skill development and for becoming job ready. Despite all this, the top 10 IT companies end up taking only 6 per cent of engineering graduates. So, obviously those with lower quality skills as compared to the basic job requirements are left out in the entire process.

Going by current employment trends in the IT sector, those who have mastered programming in functional languages like Clojure, Erlang, Scala, Haskell (predominantly used in the financial sector), Groovy which demand a steep learning curve and a different coding paradigm are really raking it in. Barely 5 per cent of the 5 million developers in India know these specialised functional languages which are used for specific mission-critical purposes.

But unfortunately, our students are not exposed to these at the college level. Most are still stuck in the Java and C++ environment, though some are beginning to use languages like Ruby, R and Python, Ocaml and F# (the latter is a an open source, cross-platform language that runs on Linux, Mac OS, Android, Windows and iOS).

According to Nasscom, 6 million people will be required in cyber-security by 2022. But we have a huge skills shortage that’s crying to be filled.