Make IT or Break IT

Sandhya Radhakrishnan was elated when she got her entrance exam results. Her scores were impressive, and her dream of becoming an engineer was soon to be realised. She was keen on specialising in information technology (IT). For, at the time, an engineering degree in IT promised a greater job potential.

Fast forward eight years. Sandhya is now working for a reputed MNC and is part of the top management. Strangely, none of her team members is an IT specialist. “I have been in this organisation for almost four years. We have been hiring professionals holding an engineering degree in computer science, mechanical, electrical & electronics, or civil. Very rarely do I come across someone who has majored in IT,” she says.

IT was a fad a few years ago, and today it’s a goner, opine experts. The demand for IT then was high merely because the IT and ITES companies were hiring engineers with basic programming skills, points out Daipyan Bannerjee, head, talent acquisition, Ace Creative Learning. “Projects that were outsourced to India involved simple, vanilla programming, which did not require high-end technical skills,” he says.

Employability
Today the scenario is complex. Companies demand better skilled people. Employability of our IT graduates has become an issue. According to NASSCOM only 25% of our IT graduates were employable. In another study, Aspiring Minds, a Gurgaon-based employability assessment firm, said only 2.68% of the 500,000 engineers that India produced annually, met the skill requirements of the IT products sector.

Naveen K, head, Orchard and Campus Talent Acquisition, Mindtree agrees with this. 
“This means that only 30% of these graduates come with relevant skills. Remainder find employment in other IT enabled jobs like infrastructure management and support, or BPO,” he says. Abdul Khadder, project manager, Hewlett Packard, says that the quality of recruits is plummeting. “Most of these candidates do not have the primary skills of problem solving or logical reasoning which is what engineering is all about,” he says.

The ‘Aspiring Minds’ report corroborates Khadder’s statement. Only a small percentage of engineers has the competence to apply engineering mathematics to solve problems, it notes. It further states that “building India’s prowess in IT products would require significant focus and investment in training and evaluating students in core technology”.

Many times, Khadder says, “Recruits flaunt newer technologies. But what projects require is fundamental programming ability and basic communication skills. Sadly, the institutes have failed to offer what the industry needs.”

Experts attribute this to dearth of skilled faculty. S Sadagopan, director (president), International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), says, “Companies find an industry-academia gap because not every college can afford expert faculty.”

Why specialise?
While it’s true that IT companies hire all kinds of engineers, techies advice students not to discount IT specialisation. PB Kotur, general manager and head, Mission10X, Wipro, says that students with IT course do have an advantage. However, they need to upgrade themselves to be in line with industry expectations. “Right skills for the right job at the right time are the business demands today. Survival of the fittest and survival of the fastest rule the IT skills space,” he shares.

Syllabus upgradation
Restructuring IT curriculum is the need of the hour, but its implementation is a must. Kotur says, “As a first step, the engineering institutes should impart good engineering education with the right kind of faculty, right curriculum and in a proactive learning environment.”

Professor S Raghunath, corporate strategy & policy, and dean (admin) IIM-B, says that IT curriculum design should be revisited every two years to ensure that it stays relevant.
“Many programming languages are undergoing change. Else, industry will not find relevance in the course context being taught in these programmes,” he signs off.