Building employable skills in engineering students through a pre-internship program: An approach to reducing unemployability in students

Abstract

Among the many aspects that effect populations is unemployability leading to poverty. This is likely to become a rapidly growing bubble that may burst, if not addressed appropriately. As a consequence of this, humanitarian crises may set in effecting people. Education has an important role to play ensuring employability which will lead to reduction of poverty as employability and poverty (or the lack of it) are related. For the purpose of this paper, employability may be considered as the capability to get into a gainful occupation, maintain it and change into new occupation if required. `Poverty would cover the entire range of constraints that restrict peoples freedom to live in society' - which may mean lack of food, poor education and living conditions, conflicts and so on [1]. High population growth is one of the major reasons in developing countries for poverty and a cause of low per capita income. Availability of jobs and the ability to be employable are therefore ways to alleviate this poverty. India with its large number of engineering colleges churns out 5-5.5 million graduates every year and has only 20-24% employability today [2]. The need for a strong connect between the needs of the industry and the development of suitable competency building pedagogy are both seen as critical to this problem solutioning. This paper discusses the development of a Skill building program that is aimed at improving the employability of tier 3 and 4 engineering colleges, where the need for employable skills is high. This program code named as SEP was initially implemented in a sizeable scale in a controlled environment and was found very successful and effective. Effectiveness was measured on the Kirkpatrick's scale at levels 3 and 4 [3]. Subsequently, a Student Skilling Program, known as Pre-Internship Program (PIP) was launched on 5 engineering colleges based on this experience. This paper discusses an approach and Pedagogy to build employable skills in them. The details of the deployment in controlled environment and its scaling up to address the social problem of poor employability in the lower tier engineering college students is discussed.