Why choosing Engineering as a career is not a cool option anymore?

A few years ago, a McKinsey report said just a quarter of engineers in India were employable. Of late, some other studies put it at less than 20%.

Not long ago, engineering, along with medicine, was a student's ticket to success in life. The standard question to children used to be: 'Will you become a doctor or engineer?' 

Not any more. There is a glut of engineers  in the country and most of them are not employable. Old problems of low-quality education and outdated curricula have become more pronounced with  automation and emerging  technology reshaping businesses. 

A few years ago, a McKinsey report said just a quarter of engineers in India were employable. Of late, some other studies put it at less than 20%. More recently, a survey by employability assessment firm Aspiring Minds said 95% of Indian engineers can’t code. 

Though graduates from India's premiere engineering colleges such as the IITs are still in demand, it is the thousands of other engineering colleges and ITIs which churn out millions of graduates every year whose employbility is questionable. 

Even today, a large chunk of Indian parents keep pushing their children to gravitate towards engineering. A handful of high-performers from top IITs do get eye-popping salaries, but it isn’t easy for most fresh graduates from institutes not in the top few. Many end up doing jobs  that are unrelated to engineering. 

More than 60% of the eight lakh engineers graduating from technical institutions across the country every year remain unemployed, according to the All India Council for Technical Education. This is a potential loss of 20 lakh man days annually. That's not all. Just 15% of engineering programmes offered by over 3,200 institutions are accredited by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA). 

When automation is replacing most of the process-based jobs, the employability challenge becomes even more daunting. 

The main problems with engineering education are inappropriate curriculum, inadequate laboratory infrastructure and a shortage of quality human resources for teaching. 

Narayanan Ramaswamy, partner and head of education and skill development at KPMG in India, said that the engineer employability debate needed to be looked at from a macro perspective. According to him, the real problem is whether what was being taught correlates to current industry requirements. 

“Don’t attack the students. You’re barking up the wrong tree then,” Ramaswamy said. “Academia has been myopic. But industry isn’t making the effort either to tell academia how things have changed and what they now want."

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