Sunday, May 11, 2008

Need for better/quality technical education

Today there is need for high quality technical education in India than ever before. It is quite evident that there is big deficit in the talent pool and fast growing IT and manufacturing sectors are in dearth of well qualified professionals. Talking about qualification and our engineering, the latter has unfortunately got the image "passport for a quick job"...well it may indeed be as easy as it sounds, but the fact is its not just a quick job but also a cheap job...yup if you took your studies easily and made it into some software company X speaking all "blah blah blah" during the interview, it is most likely that the work they have chosen you for is something which people in abroad detest to do.....but we never realise that and sadly feel elated about how we fooled the interviewer(s) and how we managed to grab fat packages in the MNCs....the truth is we are being fooled...whatever we get paid is by no means comparable to what our counterpart in US would get....

Getting back to remark i made about the lack of qualified professionals, it may sound surprising, isnt it ??? We are producing more than 2-3 lakhs of engineers every year and they are qualified definitely with a BE/BTech or ME/MTech...still there is a shortage ?? Yes, there is shortage of employable engineers...Our engineering college standards have reached abyssmal levels, that even toppers passing out of those colleges remain unemployed..Even if they manage to get employed somehow (thanks to the placements concept, where the employer comes with an intention to pick you up, unlike in off-campus, where they would try to reject you), most of them are least interested in the jobs they are doing and dont have any respect for their work...It should be evident from the fact that almost 70% of the two and half lakh students who appear for CAT every year are engineers...the number is high not because students in India have management bent of mind or they are all most capable future enterpreuners...the reason for such a high number (trust me most of that 70%are people with work ex) is simply because, these engineers are frustrated to do the work they are doing, they just wanna get out of it and MBA provides an easy option to switch....No wonder with the kind of education our engineering colleges provide and the quality of work the infosyss and TCS's of India make them do, these candidates are left with no other option...

So the bottomline is there is an urgent need for quality education, well qualified professors, state of the art infrastructure and knowledge hungry students...which our neighbouring country and competitor China has recognised quite early and has been working on it meticulously.

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