Students should make themselves fit for job market
Institutions can show the way, but students must walk on their own
Every college trains its students to become employable. In India, the placement cell becomes a beehive of activity as soon as the academic year begins. A similar pattern exists at foreign universities, but the onus rests with students, too, to prepare themselves.
Officials of University of East London, who were in the city last week for a hackathon for their Indian students, said the students were taught to network.
Kunal Jagtap, a computer science student at the university who was at the hackathon, said they had the option of an exclusive year to prepare for placement. Kunal is from Pune, did not qualify in JEE Advanced. His family suggested that he do something in his life, and he went to University of East London.
His batch-mate from the university, Mohit Kukhreja, said, “We have to network [with industry, peers and alumni].” Another student Viraj Narang said: “We understand that the job market is challenging. Placement training is embedded in the curriculum.”
Raksha Mehta, associate director of partnership and work-based learning at the university, said the university had a plan, called ‘Vision 2028’, and it was halfway through the plan that proposed embedded career and employability in the programme for building competencies and skills in the students. They would also build industry connections before they graduated.
Some Indian management students at the IE University in Madrid, Spain, whom this correspondent recently met, also said they were trained to network but the university did not have a placement system.
Premier management institutes in India too believe that students must be lifelong learners. Nagarajan Ramamoorthi. Director of the Indian Institute of Management, Amritsar, said, “Technology is evolving so fast that what we do may be outdated in three or four years. That is why, it is important for students to invest in themselves and train continuously. One of the recruiters said, ‘If I need a person tomorrow, I recruit today.’ Companies do not have time to recruit you and train you to perform a task. I would encourage each student to look and redefine their own career on a constant basis. Look for reskilling and up-skilling to be competitive in the employment market. Even those who have start-ups may have to redefine the scope of business in the light of changes taking place.”
Mr. Nagarajan gave voice to a latent fear that the current technology could become obsolete soon. “Data science may not be there in 5-6 years. There is a need for industry- and individual-level redefining, reskilling, up-tooling and up-skilling,” he said.
How should the students prepare themselves? Here’s where the faculty pitched in, he pointed out. The faculty members must do research and present their findings at conferences.
“Our faculty members are at IIM and research is expected [of them]. Conferences are fora to exchange ideas on what is happening in industry. They do a lot of education programmes and consulting work. Our faculty members are expected to reskill themselves. That is how they develop new courses such as in fin-tech and ed-tech. Now, there are courses on how finance companies operate,” he explained.
Industry experts supply 33% of the subject study. Conclaves such as human resource and finance strategy and marketing were knowledge for students as it was here prominent industry leaders debated on topics and information exchange would happen, Mr. Nagarajan remarked.
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