Last year, a study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds created a stir by claiming that 95 per cent of engineers in the country were not fit for software development jobs. IT veteran TV Mohandas Pai has termed the study "total rubbish". Pai, the Chairman of Manipal Global Education, has been a CFO and a board member at InfosysNSE -0.59 %. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw—founder, chairperson and managing director of biotechnology company Biocon—too disagreed with the findings.
 

Now an industry veteran's observations have echoed the findings of the study. CP Gurnani, CEO & MD of Tech MahindraNSE 0.25 %, has said that 94% of engineering graduated were not fit for hiring. "The top 10 IT companies take only 6% of the engineering graduates. What happens to the remaining 94%?" he said in an interview to TOI. Due to to the widening skill gap, now industry has to retrain even those who get hired. "If you come to Tech Mahindra, I have created a five-acre tech & learning ..
 

Commenting on the poor quality of engineering graduates, Gurnanai said, "Let me give you an example from a city like Delhi. A student scoring 60% marks cannot pursue BA-English today, but can definitely go in for engineering. My point is simple — are we not creating people for unemployment? The Indian IT industry wants skills. For example, Nasscom says 6 million people are required in cybersecurity by 2022. But we have a skills shortage. The point is if I am looking for a robotics person and ins ..

The Aspiring Minds study claimed that only 4.77 per cent candidates could write the correct logic for a programme—a minimum requirement for any programming job. More than 36,000 engineering students form IT-related branches of over 500 colleges took Automata—a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skills—and more than 60% could not even write code that compiles. Only 1.4 per cent could write functionally correct and efficient code, it said.

It said employability for roles such as mechanical design engineer and civil engineer stood at a meagre 5.55 per cent and 6.48 per cent respectively. The lowest employability percentage was for the chemical design engineer role at 1.64 per cent. Employability in the domain-specific roles was the highest for electronics engineers at 7.07 per cent.

 

A McKinsey report had flagged the issue more than a decade ago when it said just a quarter of engineers in India were actually employable.