“Many won´t get through campus interviews’ Just 35% of engineering graduates get placement, as they are unemployable, says expertShyam Ranganathan The Hindu
Date:26/05/2008 CHENNAI: While the number of seats in engineering colleges has increased to more than 1.3 lakh, a significant number of the students will not be placed through campus recruitment, Pandia Rajan, managing director, Ma Foi Management Consultants, said on Sunday. The increase comes despite the fact that 14 per cent of the nearly 1.1 lakh seats available were left unfilled last year. Speaking at a meeting on ‘The state of engineering education in Tamil Nadu and job prospects for fresh engineers´ organised by Nandini Voice of the Deprived, an NGO, he said the absence of transparency in engineering education was affecting the prospects of students. There were no proper guidelines for colleges to release records of their academic performance. This, he reckoned, accounted for many ill-advised choices during the counselling for engineering seats. A major cause for concern for engineering aspirants was that a number of fresh graduates were largely ‘unemployable.´ The India Labour Report 2007, a survey conducted by a staffing company TeamLease, found that nearly “57 per cent of India´s youth suffer from some degree of unemployability.’ An IT company source confirms this fact about engineering graduates. “Less than 40-50 per cent of the people I interview are employable. This is true even for professionals with a year or two of experience,’ he says. Similar numbers would hold across most IT companies. In this context, campus interviews are important as they let students interact with recruiters in comfortable surroundings. But Mr. Pandia Rajan says hardly 35 per cent of all engineering graduates get placed through campus interviews. The primary reason is the lack of good communication skills, people from the industry feel. Education opportunities without providing sufficient employment opportunities are doubly dangerous, Mr. Pandia Rajan says. L. S. Ganesh, Head of the Department of Management Studies at IIT Madras, concurs. He says character-building is becoming a neglected aspect of education with rampant corruption. Students tend to look at the world from a narrow window of perception centred on themselves and the current moment. This leads to distortions in the environment which come back to hurt society as a whole. Despite their exalted position in society, many teachers are becoming insensitive to their students. Proposing a solution to the employment problems of engineering graduates, P. K. N. Panicker, president of the Chemical Industries Association, says focus needs to shift from engineering colleges to the Indian Technical Institutes and other lower-rung institutions. © Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu |