The recently released National Employment Report by Aspiring Minds has announced that 80% of India’s engineering graduates are unemployable. The report was based on a study of more than 150,000 engineering graduates in 2015 who attended more than 650 different universities. This has highlighted India’s need to upgrade the country’s education and training system.
CTO of Aspiring Minds, Varun Aggarwal said “Engineering has become the de-facto graduate degree for a large chunk of students today. However, along with improving the education standards, it is quintessential that we evolve our undergraduate programmes to make them more job centric.”
The report goes to show that the Indian city that produces the highest number of employable engineering graduates is Delhi, followed by Bengaluru and the western parts of the country. Strong progress in the country is shown as employability by gender is almost equal for engineering graduates.
Aspiring Minds
Methodology
The report is based on a sample of more than 150,000 engineering students from 650+ engineering colleges across multiple Indian states. All these candidates graduated in 2015. The analysis and findings of this report are based on the results of these students on AMCAT: Aspiring Minds Computer Adaptive Test, which is India’s largest and only standardized employability test. AMCAT covers all objective parameters such as English communication, Quantitative aptitude, Problem-solving skills, knowledge of domain areas such as Computer Science and Programming, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering etc. for determining employability in the IT/ITeS & other core engineering roles. The test was conducted under a proctored and credible environment ensured by Aspiring Minds.
Employability has been quantified based on the benchmarking studies done at various companies in different sectors by Aspiring Minds. Currently, AMCAT is used by more than 3500 companies; including seven of the top-ten IT services companies in India, for their assessment and recruitment solutions. The benchmark for employability in a profile and sector is defined by a theoretical understanding and empirical validation of the knowledge, cognitive skills and domain expertise required. The benchmarks established for different profiles ensure both elimination of unsuccessful candidates for a job (elimination of type I error) and inclusion of all candidates who will be successful in the given job (elimination of type II error). The same has been validated among multiple companies in various sectors.
The report also covers a section on aspirations of engineers and a study which attempts to understand the factors which lead to an engineer getting a job in India. The data for the same was captured by means of a scientific survey on a stratified sample of about 27,000 engineers.
Together with the AMCAT scores, the various demographic details of the candidates are also captured by Aspiring Minds’ testing platform, which enables a comprehensive and meaningful analysis provided in the report.
Employability by Gender
In India, there are 104 males for every 100 females making the male-to-female ratio (MFR) 1.04. In contrast, the MFR in engineering colleges is 1.68. This shows that a lower proportion of females make it to engineering courses as compared to males. This ratio is better as compared to last year’s MFR of 1.72.
Conclusion of Report
One may observe that employability falls drastically towards the beginning and more gracefully towards the middle. This clearly shows that there are certain colleges which have excellent employability; however, other colleges even with close ranking show a drastic drop in employability. This is in line with the perception that certain colleges, such as the IITs and state-run colleges, are much better than others, which may be ranked just as highly. This is not a healthy trend, implying that deserving students in the other colleges find themselves cut off from better opportunities.
To further analyze this hypothesis, the study looked at the employability for the IT product role. One would expect to see a steeper trend, since IT Product employability is more strongly influenced by college education quality (rather than just intake) as compared to employability for IT Services companies.
One can observe that IT product employability falls to less than 10% at Rank 10, down from 32% at Rank 1, which is a fall of three times. On the other hand, for IT Services companies, this fall was only around 1.5 times.
In summary, the study found that the ratio of employability in top 100 colleges versus the rest is between two to six times depending on the role. In spite of this, more than 70% of employable candidates for any role are in campuses other than the top 100. With regard to employability distribution among campuses, the quality of education falls steeply among the top-ranked colleges which implies that colleges that are neighbors in rank have a very different quality of education. There are a large number of colleges with exceptionally low employability: bottom 32 percentile campuses have less than 1 in 100 candidates employable in the IT Product role and the bottom 20 percentile campuses have no candidate employable in the IT product role. Finally, we find that almost 41% of employable candidates for IT Services companies and 18% of employable candidates for IT Product companies are enrolled in campuses ranked beyond the top 750, thus forming an invisible pool to most employers in India.
