What is the status of engineering-employment?
According to the ‘Aspiring Minds’, an Employment Solutions Company, New Delhi, an employment-focused study based on 150,000 engineering graduates those are graduated in 2013 was conducted and what they found was really shocking.
About 97% of graduate engineers want jobs in core engineering or software engineering. However, only 3% have appropriate skills to employ in software or product markets, and only 7% can handle core engineering tasks.
According to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, there are 6,214 engineering and technology institutes in India, enrolling 2.9 million students and every year, about 1.5 million engineers are deployed in the job market. But the depressing situation of higher education in India ensures that they do not have enough skills to be employed.
How many engineers are unemployed in India?
According to the latest data hosted on the official website of AICTE, only 41.36% of students who graduated from the Top Engineering Colleges across India, got jobs during the placement of the academic year 2015-16 as shown in figure 2.This number is astonishing as the pass percentage in all engineering colleges was 78.67 percent in that year. Therefore, more students who pass the exams are not directly proportional to the possibility of being employed.
While the pass percentage in engineering colleges has been growing in the last five years, the number of placements has stuck around similar figures with the disappointing 38.17 percent in the academic year 2013-14.
A report by ‘Aspire Minds’ says that about 80 percent of engineering graduates in India are not employable. Most of them are compelled to work in non-engineering areas or to remain unemployed. The main reason for reducing the number of intakes in IT is automation. Experts say that by 2021, four out of every 10 jobs globally will be lost.
To end the discussion, we are left with the question of whether to go in the engineering field or not. But yes, all reports are yet to be an eye-opener for the future of engineering.