Hyderabad: Industry experts attribute the employability challenges faced by engineering graduates not to a lack of technical knowledge, but to weak mathematical, logical and analytical skills, limited curiosity and learning ability, and inadequate teamwork and communication skills.They also argue that an overdependence on the IT industry at the expense of core engineering branches has resulted in an oversupply of graduates, with only the best-performing students securing jobs while many others remain unemployed.“Not just in India, ready-made talent is unavailable anywhere in the world. Companies have always trained fresh graduates and will continue to do so. The main problem is that we have created a massive oversupply of engineering graduates, most of whom want to work in the IT sector. The sector has about 65-70 lakh employees across the country, while only around 2-3 lakh people are hired annually, including those switching jobs. How many more can it accommodate? There is a need to look at defence, infrastructure, manufacturing and banking, among other sectors, which offer ample opportunities,” said Bipin Pendyala, president of the Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association (HYSEA).Pendyala said society’s skewed preference for engineering and IT had also affected the availability of talent in other sectors.“Getting into a good degree college for BCom or BSc is 10 times more difficult than getting into some engineering colleges,” he said, adding that infrastructure companies were struggling to find qualified civil engineers even as road and railway projects continued to expand.He said the nature of jobs was also changing, with companies increasingly seeking multidisciplinary talent. Pendyala said that expecting colleges to produce ‘ready-made talent’ was unrealistic because technology and industry requirements evolve rapidly.“When I am hiring, I also assess how curious a candidate is to learn a new subject and their ability to acquire new skills. However, it has been challenging to find the right candidates, as there is a sense of entitlement among some young people. They are often unaware of their own standards and can be overly opinionated,” he added.Some experts, however, blamed the outdated curriculum and said the employability issue had persisted for more than two decades.“Less than 20% of engineering graduates were employable in 2004, and even now the issue remains the same. Back in 2000, during the dotcom era, web development was not taught to computer science graduates, and the advent of AI has only widened the gap. Shouldn’t our engineering education evolve with time? Look at countries such as Singapore and China and the emphasis they place on emerging technologies and curriculum development, which has led to innovation and patents. Our institutions, meanwhile, secure very few patents, and that in itself reflects our standards,” said Manan Sharma, a senior HR professional.He said the problem could not simply be attributed to students being unemployable, but also to a curriculum that was slow to respond to changing industry requirements.“The easiest thing to say is that young people are not employable, but the real problem lies in governance, which is failing to keep the curriculum up to date,” he said.The experts said engineering institutions should regularly seek inputs from industry to ensure students are taught skills relevant to the changing job market. They added that students should be encouraged to gain practical exposure from their first year of engineering rather than rely entirely on internships, as industry cannot accommodate all engineering students.
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