EMPLOYABILITY: A CHALLENGE

“Today employability is far bigger a challenge than unemployment”.

The term employability refers to those skills require to acquire and retain a job. Employability skills include not only many foundational academic skills, but also a variety of attitudes and habits.

A disparity exists in the types of skills taught at colleges and those that are demanded in industry.

Plagued with problems like curriculum, lack of qualified faculty, poor quality of content, and not-so-effective examination system, technical institutions do not provide signaling value in the job market.

After graduation many students fail to find employment or are forced to accept low paying jobs not commensurate with their qualifications. Institutions of management education in particular are deeply concerned to such an extent that their educational perspectives get distorted. High incidence of unemployment, underemployment or low incomes becomes a matter of serious concern to central and state governments.

As per Nasscom Press Information note:

Despite the strong fundamentals, there are already growing concerns about parts of the existing available talent pool being unsuitable for employment due to a skill gap.

‘Employability Skill Index’ was done by Purple Leap, a talent management institute, among 600 students from 15 engineering colleges in India. It tested three key employability skills - communication, problem solving and technical skills. When it came to communication skills of engineering students, 80 per cent of them did not meet the qualifying criteria. It is understood that Communication Skills is a problem area especially when it comes to students in Tier 2 & Tier 3 cities. However, it is quite ironical that most of out of the 20%, who are fine as far as communication skills are concerned, do not actually end up getting hired because of either lack of problem solving skills or technical skills. Lack of adequate problem solving skills is one of the biggest gaps leading to students not getting enough technical jobs in the industry and in many cases having to settle for ‘nontechnical’ roles, after an engineering education

More than 60% of the students do not meet the employability criteria on technical skills for the IT industry. The study also revealed that 11% of the students are employable when organisations do not consider technical skills as a criterion. Even the (30+ %) students who do meet the Technical Skills criteria are still not ‘ready-to-deploy’ as far as employers are concerned. After recruiting these students also, most organisations usually have to spend 5 to 6 months on technical training to make these students workplace ready.