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P.Balaji, Secretary, Vasavi Academy of Education:
Institutions like ours (the Vasavi Academy of Education), and I think the industry, are certainly concerned about where / how they can find graduates who are billable from day 1.

I think there has to be a greater effort from the industry also. Because, as I think you will all understand, in India academic institutions function in a system of regulations. We have an "affiliation" system wherein we are affiliated to a particular university. Therfore, some of the issues (the earlier speakers) mentioned about changes in curriculum to match the industry's requirement perhaps will not happen as frequently as we would like.

After all a student coming to an institution like ours would like to be gainfully employed after his 4-year programme. Or he should be academically prepared to pursue higher studies.

As the professor mentioned, today in AP we have 500 engineering colleges. And in this academic year alone 2008-2009, the AICTE, which is the regulatory body for technical education, has sanctioned 156 colleges. So we are going to have a very interesting time ahead because on one hand we have to slow down, on the other hand we have the problem of finding faculty and then you have 500 colleges!

The Nasscom survey and several other surveys have said that only about 20 or 25% of students coming out of such universities are employable. So what is going to happen to the rest?

This year the intake in all colleges put together is 1,40,000 students!

When we started we started looking at what it is that will get a student employed. So we looked at the curriculum, we spoke to some people in the industry - in fact I did meet Mr.Mohan Reddy and Mr.Ramalinga Raju - all this was about 15 years back - trying to understand what it is that they want.

They used to say that we need people in these and these areas, students are not aware of what's happening in the industry, they are not aware of the contemporary technologies that we require skillsets in, ...

So then we looked at the curriculum and we did realize that there wasn't much that we could do because, as I said, we do have a regulatory system. And we have to follow the curriculum that is given to us by the university. But with all these limitations we thought we need to do something about it and we looked at each of the disciplines of engineering. In Civil we identified areas like Cad, Staad, GIS, photogrammetry, etc. In Mechanical we looked at Cad, Cam and FEA. In Computer Science we looked at networking and we established the first Cisco networking lab in our college. We also looked at J2EE, in electronics we looked at wireless communications.

These were offered to students as "Value Added Courses" while they were doing their regular 4-year program. In some cases we established a lab and outsourced the training to some training institutes because we did not have the faculty who were familiar with those tools.

Now what has been happening over these past 5 or 6 years is that most of the recruitment is happening in the software industry. Last year about 400+ students got placed in our college and 90% of the students, across disciplines, were placed in the software industry. I don't know where the gap lies: is it because we do not go to the "core" engineering industries or is it that the core industries do not come to us?

The gentleman from Infotech (Enterprises) mentioned that there is a huge requriement of Mechanical Engineering students.

Let us be very frank: at the end of the day the bottom-line is "employability with a good pay package". And the industry must realise that the students have a lot of peer pressure, parental pressure to join these companies (that pay better). In fact, this year itself for the batch graduating in 2009 of the 100+ students who are eligible for placement in Mechnical (Engineering) 50 students have got placed, and all of them are in the software industry.

So that's the trend.

And what is happening in all these courses that we started a decade ago: the students started thinking "why should I do all this? After all I am not getting a job in any of these core engineering companies. And all that the software industry looks at when they come for campus placement is the quantitative, verbal, GD (Group Discussion), C++, - these are the skill sets that they are looking at."

We also have a serious concern that students from ECE and Mechanical are going and joining the Software Industry and doing projects in Java and C++ - it's a brain drain, I think!

All this that we talk about for 4 years - electronics and all that - and finally he goes and joins the software industry!

I think some better understanding should be there. What do we do now? We have all these students from ECE, EEE, Mechanical, Civil: all joining the software industry! It _is_ a brain drain, and is definitely a concern.

There is a requirement in core engineering companines. But core engineering companies do not plan their recruitment one year ahead: they do it on a need basis. "Just in time" - when they need people they go and hire students. By and large, they prefer people with experience. In my own experience I have seen very few companies who come to colleges for placement to take freshers.

They have the same issues - he doesn't know this, he doesn't know that, - yes, all these will be there, but as Surya said, once he gets a job he will learn! The basic potential is there.

These are some of the things I thought I would mention.

When we were running these courses - some of them were 240 to 300 hours, they stretched from 2nd year to final year - there were quite a few students who were interested. They did the courses. But as I said, over the past 5-6 years, they have also started thinking "Why should I go through all this?"

The other main thing is that these kinds of courses are not quantitative. They don't have an examination. That's another reason why students are not serious about these courses.

These are some of the limitations we had when we ran these course. We are still running some of them because even if 20% of the students join these course, that is good enough!

View the Videos: Part 1 and Part 2        

Other Speakers:

Professor R.Ram Reddy

Dr.Ramajeyathilagam

Mr.G.V.Surya Kumar

Faculty Opinions:

How important are fundamentals?

Can Mini-Projects be offered?

CAE should be "floated" into the curriculum!

The Curriculum and sale-ability