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)
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