A mere 3.84 per cent of Indian engineers have the technical, cognitive and language skills needed for software related jobs in start-ups. In addition only 3 per cent engineers have new-age technological skills in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, according to a report by Aspiring Minds, a job skills assessments company.

The report, titled ‘National Employability Report — Engineers 2019’, says that the employability of Indian engineers continues to be very low with over 80 per cent engineers unemployable for any job in the knowledge economy.

“For India to continue to be globally competitive and keep up its growth story, we need our young graduates to have new-age skills in AI, data, mobile and cloud. We find as low as 3 per cent engineers have these skills. This is a situation which needs to be immediately remedied both for India’s industry and our relevance to the world at large,” said Varun Aggarwal, Co-founder and CTO of Aspiring Minds.

According to the report, released on Wednesday, the US triumphs with a much higher proportion of engineers, almost four times as India, who know how to code. Around 18.8 per cent of engineers applying for IT jobs in the US can write correct codes, while only 4.7 per cent can do so in India. Whereas, Indian engineers show better potential than Chinese students in writing correct code, a much higher proportion of Indian engineers, around 3 times, write code that do not even compile.

It further added that only 40 per cent of engineering graduates end up doing an internship and 36 per cent do any projects beyond coursework.

Only 47 per cent engineers attended any industry talks, 60 per cent of faculty doesn’t talk about industry application of concepts. This makes the engineering discipline in India very theoretical. A mere 7 per cent of the candidate pool did multiple internships

“We find that a low proportion of engineers take up projects beyond the curriculum and do internships. Further, there is 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 stakeholders and building capacity,” said Aggarwal.

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