Skip to main content

Should Academia produce Industry Ready Engineering students?

Industry ready Engineering Graduates? 

Should we? Should we not? Can we? 

Often heard (when you speak to a person in the industry) "Today's students are not industry ready". And when one of my senior colleagues posed this question it occurred to me if it was possible at all for academic institutes to produce industry ready student and more importantly is it a good idea to produce students who can be absorbed by an industry.

The resulting thinking picture.

Understanding the plot!

On the x-axis is the time and on the y-axis is the expertise. A student when he finishes 10th standard has some expertise which is lower than when he has finished 12th standard (see the plot to the left of the above image). Clearly the expertise increases with Engineering (marked 1, 2, 3, 4) and the increase in the level of expertise is better during the 3rd and 4th year when one specializes and picks up electives.

As seen, good students have the expected expertise, however bright students (or those who have undergone industrial experience) have more than the desired expertise. These  students expertise is closest to what the industry requires. Independent of how good the student is, the need of the industry is a notch higher. So, there is certainly a gap Δe in expertise between the student who graduates and the expertise that the industry needs. And the Δe is different for different industries. May be for a services industry this is small but for an R&D (pursuing PhD) it might be large. Any may be for some kind of repetitive jobs it is that Δe = 0. 

There is this time duration Δt which is the duration between a studying student and a working professional. This is the time that the industry calls as "training period" the time taken to make a student who has graduated to being in the workforce. Industries are trying to minimize Δt, the shorted the Δt the quicker the student becomes a professional workforce provided the Δe is also small. Now the ΔtΔe (product) combined has to be minmized. Something along the lines of  heisenberg uncertainty, one can not have both of this small together. The crux of making students industry read is minimizing the ΔtΔe.

 The problem is that different industries require different expertise (hence Δe differs). Now the dilemma of an academic institute is what industry should they choose as their benchmark so that they can build the students expertise to that level. 

Suppose they set targets to match with the best employable industry. If the required competency is very high while then a majority of the students will not make it (fail to graduate) but the students who graduate would be industry ready. On the other hand, if they fall in line with an industry which requires lower expertise, then most of the students would be employable but this would result in none of the students being able to take up jobs that require higher expertise because in this event Δe required would be very very high. So the academia needs to choose some expertise level that is midway, which results in some Δe hence making most of the students not industry ready.

Aside of this. The question is should academia cater to the industry? Can they? Should they? My personal opinion is they should not make an attempt. The reason 
  • is the expertsie required in the industries change often (in the extereme case the most employable industry itself might change!) and it would be futile for academia to bet on one industry. 
  • academia should focus on producing students who can take up a professional path that he desires (if the academia latches on to one industry, it would kill the interest of some students who want to do something different)
  • academia need not be a feeder to a particular industry
  • the students need to feel the difference between they studies and their work (if they do not they will get bored in their work)

 Endnote

Making  students industry ready might be possible with careful planning between the academia and the industry, but I think this should be best avoided because such a planning will churn out student who have a smaller professional canvas.  A  wider canvas will come into play when the Δe gap indeed exists, so that students  can professionally grow in any direction that they want to. Or may be create newer professions (startups?). 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visualizing Speech Processing Challenges!

Often it is difficult to emphasize the difficulty that one faces during speech signal processing. Thanks to the large population use of speech recognition in the form of Alexa, Google Home when most of us are asking for a very limited information ("call my mother", "play the top 50 international hits" or "switch off the lights") which is quite well captured by the speech recognition engine in the form of contextual knowledge (it knows where you are; it knows your calendar, it know you parents phone number, it knows your preference, it knows your facebook likes .... ). Same Same - Different Different:   You speak X = /My voice is my password/ and I speak Y= /My voice is my password/. In speech recognition both our speech samples (X and Y) need to be recognized as "My voice is my password" while in speaker biometric X has to be attributed to you and and Y has to be attributed to me! In this blog post we try to show   visually   what it means to pro
Post a Comment
Read more

BITS Pilani Goa Campus - Some Useful Information

You have cleared the BIT Aptitude Test and have got admission to BITS Pilani Goa Campus. Congratulation . Well Done. This is how the main building looks! Read on for some useful information, especially since you are traveling for the first time to the campus and more or less you will face the same scenario that we faced! We were asked report on 29-Jul-2018 (Sunday) to take admission on, 30-Jul-2018.  We reached Madgoan (we traveled by train though the airport is pretty close to the BITS campus, primarily to allow us to carry more luggage!)at around 0700 hours (expect a few drizzles to some good rain - so carry an umbrella) on 29-July-2019. As you come out you will be hounded by several taxi drivers, but the best is to take the official pre-paid taxi. It should cost you INR 700 to reach the BITS campus. We had booked a hotel in Vasco (this is one of the closest suburb from BITS campus, a taxi should charge you around 300-350 INR; you will make plenty of trips!) and
2 comments
Read more

Authorship or Acknowledgement? Order of Authors!

 {Personal views} Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors.  Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.   However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These days labs write papers
Post a Comment
Read more