80% of engineers not employable for any job in knowledge economy: Report

New Delhi: A report by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds has said that 80 percent of engineers are not employable for any job in the knowledge economy.

As per its National Employability Report for Engineers, Aspiring Minds found that only 2.5 percent of Indian engineers possess the skills in artificial intelligence that includes machine learning and data science.

Only 1.5 percent - 4.5 percent of engineers possess the necessary skills in data engineering, while only 2.8 percent - 5.3 percent are qualified in wireless technologies.

This report is based on a sample of more than 170,000 engineering students from 750+ engineering colleges across multiple Indian states, Aspiring minds noted.

The report found host of reasons behind low employability of engineering students. It said that since engineering is an applied discipline, only 40 percent of engineering students in India perform internships and only 36 percent undertake projects outside  their  assigned  coursework.  

60 percent of faculty do not discuss how engineering concepts apply to industry. Only 47 percent of students report the opportunity to attend a talk by industry personnel during their college career, it said.

The report found that the percentage of Indian engineers who code well is greater than the number of Chinese engineers. A much higher proportion of Indian engineers (37.7%) cannot write a compilable code compared to Chinese engineers (10.35%).

By comparison, the US engineers perform four times better than Indian engineers in coding. Only 4 percent of the US candidates cannot write compilable code despite the fact that the base of the engineering population in the US is approximately four times smaller than in India, it added.