Improving Employability Skills among IT & Engineering Students

Abstract

This paper is about improving employability skills among youth, particularly among engineering students. It focusses on the skills required by industry, particularly the IT industry, and ways and means to develop those required skills among the students to make them more employable. It tries to bridge the gap between industry and academic institutions. This paper will benefit students from any stream who wish to make a career in IT. With the IT boom, quite a few students from all engineering streams chose a career in IT. Hence this paper should be relevant to all technical streams of engineering. Most Employability Trainings for college students focus on cosmetic improvements in presentation style, personality development, language skills, etc. to impress the interviewer. As a Senior IT professional who has over 30 years of industry experience, mostly as CIO, the author feels that these cosmetic attributes are less significant for candidates from technical streams like engineering, particularly for IT function. What is required and appeals the most to the interviewer is not his/her personality, not even the current technical knowledge. Appears strange when I exclude technical knowledge? The paper will soon reveal why. Having worked with and trained several youngsters on the job, the I can vouch that the industry needs different skills in this environment of rapid technological changes. The paper discusses what exactly those skills are. This paper presents a much better, interesting and effective way to make IT and other engineering students, more employable. The method described here not only makes them more employable for their first employment after college, but it also helps them to remain employable, skilled and relevant throughout their career. This paper tries to identify those skills and discuss why they are important. More significantly, the paper not only presents a strategy to develop those skills in students by catching them young but also shows how the strategy was practically implemented to ensure that the students benefited from the strategy. The training is now available to students and colleges with upgraded contents, mostly free of cost.