A report published in Times Now News, reveals that in the last 5 years almost 6 lakh engineering seats were scrapped in India and students are losing interest to pursue engineering, particularly in the non-IT programmes. Even premium institutions like IITs, NITs are struggling to fill their seats in non-IT streams.
Based on the data available one can easily conclude that apart from Software Engineers all other engineering professionals have no future in the 21st century. This means India will work substantially less in construction (roads, buildings, cities, dams etc.), manufacturing sector will become poorer, no new vehicle will come up from the showroom, power plants will be abolished and the list goes on and on. Let us dig deeper and find out the global perspective on the demand of engineering professionals.
Interestingly, analysis on world’s most in-demand professions, shows that among top 10 professions, 7 are from engineering. Software Engineers are placed at 1st Rank expectedly, but 2nd and 3rd high demand professions include – Electronics and Mechanical Engineers. Surprised!? Please don’t. Engineering as a profession will remain the most demanding sector at least for another five decades. A blog published in MIT website, in March 2021, shows that the 10 most demanding engineering jobs for future are 1. Automation and Robotics Engineering, 2. Data Science and Data Analytics Engineering, 3. Project Engineering, 4. Renewable Energy Engineering, 5. Civil Engineering, 6. Environmental Engineering, 7. Bio Medical Engineering, 8. Software System Engineering, 9. Mechanical Engineering and 10. Electrical Engineering. Almost similar analysis is given by other analysts from America and Europe. For the sake of information, Automation and Robotics, and Project Engineering are part of Mechanical Engineering, whereas Environmental Engineers are extracted from Civil Engineering .
Then why the engineering colleges are struggling in India? The simple answer is that, we are not able to produce engineers which the world is expecting. Our engineers don’t have the skill sets which multinational companies are expecting in the 21st century. Industry 4.0 took place in early 2010. All big companies changed their production line; automation and robotics became part of everyday life. People even started using IOT application at home. But unfortunately, in most engineering branches we are still teaching engineering from 1970-1980s books. We can argue that fundamental never change, but too much fundamental can only land us in basic researches, it will never help us to be competent enough to work in 21st century work force.
Implementing the Industry 4.0 in our coursework will definitely help us to take the first positive step. At the same time, we also need the giant multinational companies to come forward and collaborate with the Engineering Institutes for their own survival. If industries don’t have the manpower to work on their highly sophisticated machinery, how they will run their business?
Sushant University, one of the best private universities in Delhi-NCR, located in the Millennium City Gurugram, Haryana has addressed this issue in a very unique way. They launched all their engineering programs, from Computer Science Engineering to Civil Engineering, or from Mechanical Engineering to Electronics & Communication Engineering, or Electrical Engineering along with industry partners, with all latest technologies required to be master in Industry 4.0. The uniqueness of these courses is that, students will get additional certificate from the industry after skilling themselves in any particular specialization like Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Cyber Security, Full Stack Development, 5G & IOT, Digital Manufacturing, Smart Cities, Renewable Energy. These kind of specializations help students to become the front runner in technology and industries are always looking forward to absorb them. School of Engineering & Technology, Sushant University, with top Engineering Programmes, is able to place more than 97% of their students in 2020 and 2021 with an average package of 6.5 LPA. This is expected that the inspiring story of Sushant University will help other Engineering Colleges of India to work in the same front, to make future ready new age engineers.
To know more about the programmes of School of Engineering and Technology you can click here.
Written by
Dr. Sudipto Sarkar,
Dean, School of Engineering & Technology,
Sushant University, Gurugram
