Panaji: The state on Tuesday opened a ‘centre of excellence for employability enhancement’, to provide skill improvement and entrepreneurship training to students from engineering colleges and other technical institutions.
To mark the event, 163 MoUs were signed between Goa’s five engineering colleges and various companies.
Padma Bhushan awardee Ajai Chowdhry, who was present on the occasion, said bridging the skill gap for engineering graduates in India was the need of the hour.
“There are 2.7 million engineering seats in India, of which only 1.4 million got filled. Interest in engineering programmes is reducing among students because they can’t get employed. As per a survey, 37% engineers in India cannot write error-free code, while this figure is only 10% in China. After recruiting engineers in India, it takes companies 6-8 months to get them up to speed. This model of firms re-training engineers has become unsustainable. Companies cannot keep spending so much,” Chowdhry, who is also co-founder of HCL Infosystems Ltd, said.
He said that as jobs in big data analytics and artificial intelligence were set to rise considerably, the academia would be further challenged to prepare engineering graduates for the job market. He suggested that marketing Goa’s institutions aggressively to foreign students by creating marketing cells and nurturing entrepreneurship among engineering graduates was the solution to this challenge.
Chowdhry also said that the implementation of the MoUs needed to be closely monitored if the centre of excellence for employability enhancement is to succeed.
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Chief minister Pramod Sawant, on his part said internship could be a game-changer for engineering students. “Surveys paint a dismal picture and industries say they struggle to get qualified manpower. We need to give career guidance to students and parents right at the entry level,” he said, adding that the government was considering a scheme wherein it could collaborate with industries to give students a decent stipend during apprenticeship stints. “This will help bring students on par with industry requirements,” he said.
Industries minister Vishwajit Rane said Goa would soon have an international skill institute set up in collaboration with one in Singapore. He said the institute would hold training courses for teachers and faculty members. “The state will have to play a role in this. A student needs to be seen as an employable commodity, where he or she could even be exported,” Rane said.
Sitaram Kandi, vice-president HR, Tata Motors, Mumbai, said faculty members of colleges should compulsorily do a two-month summer internship at least once in five years. He said this would be more feasible than revising the syllabus of engineering colleges every few years.
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