Through a tie-up with a US-based software company, Karunya University is training its engineering graduates to be job-ready. Prachi Rege reports.
As per a report published by NASSCOM, a fifth to a third of the million students graduating out of engineering colleges in India run the risk of being unemployed. The onus to create skilled-professionals lies with both, the education institutes and the industry. Among the many academic-industry partnerships that have been signed, to achieve the feat of skilling the graduates, yet another one has been struck. This time it is between Coimbatore-based Karunya University and Novell Inc, a multinational software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah. “This partnership will help tackle the dearth of employable talent graduating from colleges and serve the common purpose of both the graduates as well as the industry,” says Venkatesh Swaminathan, country head, The Attachmate Group, which owns Novell. Commenting on the tie-up, R Elijah Blessing, director, School of Computer Science and Technology, Karunya University informs, “We want our graduates to have an edge in the competitive market where only the skilled will survive in the long run.”
Under the collaboration, the University is offering a MTech programme in information technology. The curriculum has been designed with inputs from experts from Novell. It also includes in-house courses of the company (SEE BOX). “We have included aspects like mobility, cloud computing, security and big data etc. which are revolutionising the industry,” informs Swaminathan. A team of professionals from Novell have trained 15 Karunya faculty members under the ‘train the trainer programme’. The Novell Center of Excellence has also been set up on the campus to support lab experiments of M-Tech students. As a part of the agreement, Karunya University is an authorised Novell Practicum Center where students can write certificate examinations and become Novell certified professionals after finishing their course.
Reflecting on the numerous academic-industry tie-up Swaminathan says, “At a national level too, government organisations like the National Skill Development Center has partnerned with private organisations to help skill millions of people especially in the IT and ITES sector. There is certainly a positive effect on the quality of students graduating and entering the industry, reducing the time and resources used to re-skill and train them.”
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Novell courses in the curriculum include:
Products for students to work on:
