Posted on 12/31/2022 6:27:03 PM PST by nwrep
In a country like India, we are highly driven by herd mentality. Whenever we see some success in a particular career, we tend to get attracted in masses towards it. Engineering is one such profession. India produces about 150,000 engineers per year, and very few of them eventually get engineering-related jobs.
According to an Employability Survey done in 2019, 80% of Indian engineers are not fit for jobs.
In the early 1990s, India was going through liberalization that lead to a boom in manufacturing. This created a lot of new jobs and engineering as a career became popular. We then saw a sudden rise in engineering institutes all over India. Backed with heavy marketing and PR, engineering became an ideal career in the minds of every Indian parent for their children. During this time there was a sudden spurt of engineering institutes, but many of these institutes struggled to get quality of teaching staff and infrastructure.
Engineers also became an ideal hiring choice for companies like Infosys, TCS, HCL, Satyam (now Tech Mahindra) etc., which started providing training to tens of thousands of engineering graduates and started placing them overseas for contract IT service job opportunities. This was very lucrative for students as they got to travel overseas and earn a fat USD salary compared to their peers, and this helped these IT companies grow exponentially during the mid-1990s. It became a win-win situation for students, engineering institutes and IT service companies.
However, this didn’t last long, as by the mid-2000s engineering institutes were producing engineers in millions, and engineering degree became just an entry ticket for getting into an IT services company. Soon everybody took up engineering for the sake of it, with an IT career in mind as their objective. Engineering fields like mechanical, electrical, civil etc. thus lost their relevance, as a job in one of these fields in India would pay way less compared to an IT job.
Key factors that led to the downfall in producing quality engineers in India, which eventually made them unemployable across all specializations:
Push by Indian parents for their kids to take up an engineering course, without considering their interest towards it.
Due to mass rise of engineering institutes, teaching staff quality suffered. Thus with lack of engaging lessons and updated curriculum, they were not able to awaken the interest of students toward engineering.
Rahul Ahuja, an IT engineer + MBA with over 15 years of experience in Telecom, Content and Telematics discusses why Indian engineers are not employable.
“Engineering no longer remains the best of career choices,” he says. “The problem lies not only with the sheer number of engineers the country has produced over the last 20 years, and that the demand vs supply equation is working against this profession, but also because the curriculum of engineering courses has not changed at the level the industry has changed. Industry today demands techno-functional and technical leaders, who can be flexible to learn new technologies quickly.”
Even in the field of IT Engineering, India struggles to produce good quality engineers. Another one of the reasons pointed out by Rahul Ahuja is that most IT engineers tend to build their skill sets in easy IT skills and tend to shy away from complex technologies and difficult skills. This leads to high competition for IT jobs with simpler skill requirements, thus rendering a lot of IT engineers unemployable for jobs that require higher IT skills and complex technologies.
Main Reasons why Indian Engineers are not Employable Deepak Raj Ahuja, mechanical engineer with 45+ years of experience in the steel & heavy engineering industry, sheds some light on the matter.
Why indian engineers are not innovative
There are too many engineering colleges in India that are failing to produce high-quality engineers. According to him, here are a few main reasons why Indian engineers are unemployable:
1.The engineering education does not focus on developing skill-sets that are in accordance with industry demand.
2. Engineering colleges are run like a business, instead of like an institution, wherein the top management has little incentive to train engineers for jobs.
3.The founders and Executive Directors or key decision makers in most engineering colleges are often non-engineers, who don’t really understand the changing industry and its skill requirements.
4.Most engineering colleges are located in faraway places, at a large distance from industrial area. This along with the classroom-based curriculum limits students’ industry visits. So they get little to no exposure of the actual industry practices.
5.The engineering curriculum prepares students to become officers and managers, not workers. In reality, newly employed engineers belong on the shop floor, not in offices. It is with a lot of experience that they are promoted to become officers. However, as mentioned before, the colleges’ curriculum is fully classroom-oriented, and fails to mentally or physically prepare engineering students to be on the shop floor.
Their CVs are often total BS.
Somehow more rude than Chinese people.
Their food stinks.
No problem.
They’ll emigrate to the US and get hired by their fellow piss drinking cow worshippers to be America’s ruling caste.
What could go wrong?
I’ve worked with a lot of Indian engineers and a lot of Chinese engineers. I can’t recall a good engineer from either group. No creativity, no “roll up your sleeves and get it done” attitude.
I’ve known a bunch of solid engineers from Russia. But they are less common than Asian immigrants.
There is room for everybody, if our ruling class was really interested in an efficient education system for all and a meritocratic system.
There are not enough good Indian restaurants in my opinion. I like Indian curries like Chana Masala and Chicken Chettinad. But there is not enough restaurants serving those dishes.
There are way more Chinese restaurants serving Kung Pao Chicken and Shrimp and Broccoli. But not enough Indian restaurants serving curries.
This is where the engineering skills of the Indian people can be put to good use.
It’s not only IT. I’ve had to manage transactional accounting teams there. All “degreed” What a joke. A college on every corner. It was interesting for me, especially since I’m of Indian descent but very very removed from the customs and culture
I’m hiring no Indian Engineer named Casey Jones.
Wait a second. Indian food has some of the most creative spicing on the planet. Their vegan food is good, and their tandoori plates are excellent.
Just do not dare get confused and call an Indian a Paki.
Some get agitated about that. Regional pecking order.
I have worked with some excellent engineers form India.. and I’ve worked with a lot that Just flat out stunk.
US companies see offshoring IT as a way to drop costs. All they do is sacrifice quality, scope and time for a dollar savings. There is no return on investment.
I had my first business wrecked by Indian “programmers.” By the time we found out their resumes were all lies and their placement firm was a fraudster and they didn’t know shit and covered for each other, the damage was done. Never hired another one and have worked to fight H1Bs and other giveaways for 20+ yrs since.
IT is my understanding that they are somewhat responsible for the horrible engineering that caused all those Boeing’s to dive into the ground. In my day a 3rd grade American had more sense.
They make entire apartment complexes smell.
Vegan food is for fags.
There’s a lady at work who doesn’t know her job, so she calls her husband, also in IT, but at another company, to find out what to do.
Both are from India.
That’s my experience as well.
Just like any other ‘group’ of engineers, they are mostly average... with outliers, some are downright lousy to be fired immediately, and others that are geniuses that walk on water.
Their turkey gobble on the phone is incomprehensible gibberish?
I swore off HP stuff after too many frustrating episodes of turkey gobbling phone “help line”>
My wife and I love Indian food. Never had vegan Indian food.
Going back to 1985, I was living in Vancouver Canada.
Seemingly every taxi driver was an Indian immigrant and with a PhD in engineering or physics or.....
Most would ask me for a job or leads to a job.
“I can not find a job since I came here!”
Now I know why.
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