Preparing engineers for new careers in the digital economy
Professor (Dr.) Sasmita Samanta and Raghav Gupta
The next generation of engineering graduates will need very different skills to solve challenges for Digital India, which is one of the fastest digital adopters in the world.
The demand for engineers is surging as digital technologies transform businesses – a recent survey by Manpowergroup shows technology and IT roles have the “strongest” employment outlook in the country at 51%. The job market is brimming with opportunities for engineering graduates, but with a caveat: Employers want engineers with job-relevant, digital skills. The new Coursera Campus Skills Report 2022 shows Indian students are prioritizing foundational digital skills such as HTML and CSS, data structures, cloud computing and C programming, reflecting the opportunities ahead. The most in-demand jobs for learners include Software Engineer (18%) and Data Scientist (15%).
Against this backdrop, India’s leading technical institutes will need new approaches to prepare students for emerging digital jobs. Here are five shifts we believe can guide institutes to respond to the challenge and harness the opportunity ahead.
Building relevance and agility
National Education Policy 2020 is to bring multidisciplinary learning into the mainstream. This can be a transformational idea for engineers, who have the opportunity to drive wide impact across tech-driven enterprises.
An engineering education can no longer survive in isolation. It has to be integrated with an understanding of a domain or layered with capabilities that complement core technical skills – like competencies related to the use, analysis, and design of data, which are now a business-wide requirement. To strengthen multidisciplinary learning, several partnerships to offer engineering students a credit bearing “open” elective are in place.
Each semester, students can choose from 60 elective options online across disciplines like management, biotech, law, and engineering, to earn credit from leading universities and industry players such as University of Illinois at Urbana-champaign, University of Michigan, University of California San Diego, Google and IBM.. Such an approach can empower future engineers to build a versatile portfolio of skills that can be applied to multiple career paths.
Delivering hands-on learning for applied skills
closer industry and university interdependency, so learning is aligned to business needs, with enhanced opportunities for collaboration and internships.
To that end, we are seeing more industry leaders come forward to strengthen this connect, which is creating a virtuous cycle of learning--students have new opportunities to co-relate theory with applied knowledge from industry partnerships. Equally, more workers are returning to campus to reskill. As part of Work Integrated Learning Programs, professionals from organizations are learning in a blended mode at institutions, online and through campus visits. This gives industry workers an immersive campus experience, while students get indirect exposure to the workplace.
Overall, it facilitates a valuable exchange of ideas and knowledge.
Companies are also rethinking industry-academia linkages for impact. Technology employers like Google and IBM, for instance, have turned educators with online certificates for digital skills in areas like data analytics and data science, aimed at closing industry skill gaps.