Only 4.2 per cent of engineering graduates passing out each year are fit to work in a software product company.
In IT services companies, a mere 17.8 per cent are employable, that too after being trained on the job for a minimum three months.
BIG GAP
There is ‘big gap' between what the industry needs and what the engineering education provides, says Mr G. Vijaya Raghavan, Member, Kerala State Planning Board.
There has been more than doubling of the capacity of engineering seats in the country during the last five years.
The number of engineering graduates – including technology graduates in computer science, electronics and telecom streams – has almost doubled to 10 lakh.
The irony of huge numbers of unemployed engineering graduates co-existing with shortage of employable talents cannot simply be escaped.
PASS-THE-EXAM
Mr Vijaya Raghavan said this while inaugurating PassTheExam, an initiative here by Career Centre, for mentoring students who must clear accumulated B Tech supplementary papers.
The explosive growth in demand for engineering graduates from the IT industry enabled excellent careers, high salaries and a comfortable working environment.
But the hidden truth is that most of the jobs offered at the entry level for the initial 5-10 years could as well have been done by any smart graduate in science.
This, along with demand from other sectors of the industry, set the stage for a liberalised engineering education regime.
Excessive outflow of bright graduates in this manner has an ‘unintended consequence' with long-term adverse implications for engineering education.
SERIOUSLY HIT
“Our post-graduate and doctoral programmes for engineering/technology areas are seriously affected,” Mr Vijaya Raghavan said.
But he said that the market will take care of the problem of supply side dynamics of engineering graduates, unlike in the case of the demand side.
The process has already begun, with a few hundreds of under-resourced engineering colleges being forced to close down ‘for want of adequate number of students.'
Among those who spoke included Prof K. N. Radhakrishnan Nair, Principal Advisor to PassTheExam, and Mr B. Meerasaheb, Consulting Administrator, Career Centre.