How can India create employable engineers? Expert shares a way forward

Engineering education plays a critical role in shaping the future workforce of any country. In recent years, there has been growing concern about the quality of engineering graduates produced by institutions in India. Approximately 2500 to 3000 engineering colleges in India produce around 1.5 million, or 15 lakh, engineering graduates annually. However, out of these graduates, only about 15% to 20%, or roughly 2.5 lakh engineers, possess the necessary technical and communication skills and are considered employable by the industry.

In addition, many industry leaders have expressed dissatisfaction with the skills and knowledge levels of freshly minted engineers, leading to concerns about their readiness for the job market. This raises important questions about the effectiveness of current engineering education practices and highlights the need for reforms aimed at creating more employable graduates.

One of the primary challenges facing engineering education in India is the lack of alignment between curriculum and industry needs. Engineering programmes often emphasize theoretical concepts over practical applications, which can leave students unprepared for real-world tasks. Furthermore, many universities fail to update their course materials regularly, meaning that students may learn outdated technologies and techniques that aren’t relevant in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. To address this issue, schools must ensure that their syllabi reflect contemporary industry requirements while incorporating emerging trends such as artificial intelligence, data science, cloud computing, etc.

Another challenge lies in the shortage of experienced faculty members who possess both academic credentials and industrial expertise. This gap between theory and practice further widens due to a limited number of full-time teachers, frequent transfers, temporary appointments, and absences from classes. Therefore, colleges should strive to attract top talent by offering competitive salaries and benefits, providing opportunities for professional development, and nurturing research environments conducive to innovation and collaboration with industries.

India has set a target to become a USD 5 trillion economy by 2025, which implies an annual growth rate of approximately 7% to 8%. However, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of two years of economic activity, the IMF's World Economic Outlook predicts that the Indian economy will reach the USD 5 trillion mark in 2026–27, starting from its current size of USD 3.2 trillion in 2021–22.

To achieve such growth, efficient manufacturing based on digital technologies is crucial, not just in terms of generating employment but also for driving innovation and entrepreneurship in core engineering sectors. The key growth sectors that require complex engineering innovations and the deployment of digital deep tech in order to meet the growth targets are agriculture, manufacturing, transport, energy, digital governance, and medical electronics. This means that success in the IT services industry alone is not enough to achieve the desired economic growth.

To ensure that engineering graduates in India are employable and capable of driving innovation and entrepreneurship, the curriculum design, teaching, research, innovation, and entrepreneurship continuum must be implemented. This requires a transformation of the curriculum and delivery mechanism, with a focus on experiential learning, in order to be industry ready.

The change in the curriculum starts with the replacement of the old-school engineering workshop experiments—comprising individual skills like tinsmithy, carpentry, etc.—with a bouquet of skills required for technology exploration and product engineering. This creates the systems engineering mindset, at a very early stage in the engineering course. Subsequently, in the second and third years, the course content and delivery emphasize experiential learning to train the students in problem solving through different simulations as well as hands-on, end-to-end solution development using an interdisciplinary approach. Such an approach prepares the students to take up translational research problems to solve real-world problems as part of their final year capstone project.

In addition, the institutes should work on inculcating industry-related frameworks and entrepreneurship in their curriculum. This will help students take an idea from conception to the incubation stage while still completing their college work. This saves students valuable time, energy, and money, and creates an entrepreneurial mindset. GITAM (Deemed to be University) has already taken a step in this direction and has launched a multitude of efforts, including, initiating the Technology Exploration and Product Engineering course, setting up the centers of innovation in the areas of autonomous systems and extended reality, and furnishing the teaching and research laboratories to enhance experiential learning.

Way Forward

To sustain India's growth trajectory through innovation and entrepreneurship in digital deep tech—in domains like autonomous systems and robotics, augmented and virtual reality, nano-scale devices, etc.—there is an urgent need to address the skill gap among engineering graduates, which currently hinders their employability. A paradigm shift is required to address this issue, starting with a rationalization of the curriculum to make it more experiential and interdisciplinary. By integrating such pedagogy with research and innovation, a continuum can be created that helps build a talent pool of employable engineers in deep tech, who can contribute to India's growth in the target sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, transport, energy, digital governance, and medical electronics.

(Disclaimer: Views are expressed by Ravi Kishore Bhagavathula, Senior Director - Research & Innovation (Engineering), GITAM (Deemed to be University.) Views expressed are personal. Republic World does not take any responsibility for its correctness.)