Less than 8% engineers fit for core roles: Study

Significant efforts need to be made to improve employability in the engineering sector as less than eight per cent of Indian engineers are employable in core engineering roles, reveals an Aspiring Minds report.

The National Employability Report for the first time this year looked at employability of specialised and new careers that are available to engineers, other than core IT and software roles.

The nationwide analysis based on a sample of 150,000 showed there was a huge gap in skills of engineers, as needed, to work in large industry.

“There are several problems with regard to employability in core engineering roles. We need to excite students about these jobs. Everyone's focus today is on IT. We want students to design and build things. We need emphasis on the basics, for instance, basic electrical engineering, basic concepts of mechanics and so on,” Varun Aggarwal, chief technology officer, Aspiring Minds said.

The government’s Make in India initiative aspires to create manufacturing capacity in the country and generate 100 million jobs by 2022.

Low employability of engineers, however, will impede the growth of manufacturing in India in a big way and requires immediate intervention, the firm said.

Employability for roles like mechanical design engineer and civil engineer stand at a meagre 5.55 per cent and 6.48 per cent, respectively.

The lowest employability percentage was recorded for the chemical design engineer role at 1.64 per cent.

Employability in the domain specific roles is the highest for electronics engineers at 7.07 per cent.

This percentage is considerably lower than that in IT roles like software engineer – IT services and associate ITeS operations (Hardware Networking), which stood at 17.91 per cent and 37.06 per cent, respectively.

The study on employability across metros reveals higher employability in Delhi and Mumbai with employability for the electronics design engineer role as high as 19 per cent followed by cities like Bengaluru, Kolkata and Hyderabad.

The lowest employability figure across roles was observed in Chennai with employability for the civil design engineer role as low as 1 per cent, the report said.