Dark clouds in employment sector and the silver lining

Technocrats in the country observed the Engineers’ Day on 15 September 2020 as a tribute to the great- est Indian engineer and Bharat Ratna Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya. Engineering has always been a popular career choice among students in India. The engineering industry has always been able to pull students to it due to job security and the defined growth trajectory that it offers. While the number of engineers passing out every year increases, the lack of skill set beyond the core competency of an engineer amongst the talent pool and increasing shift towards automation are stagnating the engineering ecosystem in India. The Annual Employability Survey 2019 report revealed that 80 percent of graduates are unfit for jobs and unemployment.

While the pandemic hasn’t been kind to anyone, it has created a vast number of problems for the education sector. From schools to institutions of higher education, everything has been shut down to prevent the spread of infection, and if it weren’t for the advancement in technology and the availability of tools like video conferencing and the Internet, the education sector would have been brought to an excruciating and grinding halt.

Many senior executives from leading IT firms have stated that even though the pandemic has affected their businesses, they will continue to hire fresh graduates from top campuses. However, lateral hiring has been frozen in most companies and the experienced candidates are being hired strictly on a need basis. “Many IT firms are readjusting their hiring-strategy to have just enough new employees in order to meet any anticipated surge in demand. Once the demand picks up, a lot of companies would suffer from shortage of resources. Those companies that are going the extra mile in terms of hiring judiciously now will have a definite competitive edge. The top Indian IT companies, including Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, HCL Technologies, Wipro, etc, have all explicitly stated that they would continue hiring, even amid the pandemic,” says Prof Ranjan Bose, director, IIIT-Delhi (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology).

Another thing to note is that many entry-level positions have opened up in the companies at the expense of a few mid-level positions. The HR experts are suggesting that the mid-level positions that have been vacated are unlikely to be filled up soon, and most probably, the companies would distribute the work of such positions among a number of fresh-hires. “Most companies will be opting for a virtual mode for recruiting, which will include online tests and online inter- views using some of the standard video-conferencing tools. One of the possible changes that can be explored for technical screening is to use multi-modal assessment methodologies, including randomized MCQs, short essays and case- study outcomes. The online interviews can be simultaneously judged by multiple assessors in order to gain bet- ter insights into the candidate’s soft skills, including leadership skills and personality. The HEIs should proactively help students prepare for online tests and interviews. The responsibility lies equally with the students, the teachers and the IT companies to ensure that the ‘quality of hiring’ does not suffer during these changed times,” adds Prof Bose.

The Covid-19 crisis is likely to contour the engineering land- scape for the next several years. Undermining the potential impact of this pandemic is likely to cause severe damage to this sector in general and to the lives of students in particular. The overall impact will depend not only on ‘how’ we respond but ‘how fast’ we respond and to develop an effective plan for the continuation of education, being adaptive is the key.

4 online platforms that promise to make engineers job ready:

1. BridgeLabz: This is one of the largest IP-driven incubation labs aimed at nurturing engineering talent and ideas emerging in the technology space. Platform is offering a 30-day online CodinClub bootcamp to upskill the fresh engineering, IT talent in India and improve the overall coding proficiency. It further connects top-per- forming candidates with its partner companies for assured jobs. Currently more than 800+ users are undergoing the 30-day coding bootcamp and the latest round of interviews has now begun with considerable interest from the organisations.
2. DALHAM Learning: The Bengaluru-based startup, founded in July 2020, offers social science and liberal arts courses for undergraduates and postgraduates of engineering and management disciplines. The main objective is looking to bridge the employability and skill gap. The platform is the outcome of a unique Indic liberal approach to education that has evolved over a period of time. The organisation is dedicated to provide students with a holistic education model immersed in liberal studies and offers integrated liberal edu- cation programmes to higher education institutions for students of engineering and management courses. Through various programs DALHAM Learning aims to provide opportunities to the students to explore a variety of academic areas from science to literature
3. GitHub: A platform for the open source developer community which was acquired by Microsoft Corp in 2018, is providing virtual or remote internships to students for 6-8 weeks through its global partnership with technology giants like Facebook. Students in the program are placed in small groups of 8-10, called “pods”, along with a professional mentor and 2-3 open source project maintainers. The students within a pod collaborate on projects over the course of a programme.
4. InterviewBit: Founded in 2015, the Bengaluru-based start-up offers computer science courses through live online classes. Students are mentored and taught by tech leaders and experts working with companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix, among others. The start-up aims to polish the skills of fresh college graduates, working professional engineers and make them job ready.