95% Indian engineers “Unfit for High Skill Programming” jobs : Study

New Delhi : There is a large skill gap between the engineers trained at IT institutes in India and the basic knowledge required to land jobs as software developers. A study found that 95 per cent of engineers in India are unfit to take up software development jobs.

The study, which was conducted on over 36,000 engineering students from IT branches of more than 500 different colleges, found that only 4.77 per cent of the candidates who took the “Automata” test were able to write the correct logic for a programme. This is the base requirement for any programming job.

“Lack of programming skills is adversely impacting the IT and data science ecosystem in India. The world is moving towards introducing programming to three-year-old! India needs to catch up,” said Aspiring Minds Co-Founder Varun Aggarwal.

Rote learning based approaches, rather than practical methods of learning by actually writing programmes, were found to be one of the prime reasons behind this employability gap. A practice of programming helps the student understand the different problems faced while coding and would encourages them to find different solutions.

In addition to this, the study also observed that there was a lack of good teachers for programming. It noted that most good programmers take up industry jobs for the high salaries. The programming skills among the tier III colleges were also found to be worse than than those at tier 1 colleges.

“Sixty nine per cent of candidates from top 100 colleges are able to write a compilable code versus rest of the colleges where only 31 per cent are able to write a compilable code,” the report noted.

Among the students who took the Automata test, which is “a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skill”, more than two-thirds could not even write compilable codes.

Note: News shared for public awareness with reference from the information provided at online news portals.