Every year,thousands of engineering graduates pass out of college,but only a tiny handful of them are trained in the skills that employers need now.Over 80 percent of them are unemployable for any job in the knowledge economy,said a report by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds.

“We find that a low proportion of engineers take up projects beyond curriculum and do internships.Further,there is a lack of faculty talking about industry application of concepts in class or students getting exposure through industry talks,” said Aspiring Minds Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Varun Aggarwal.

“These need to be remedied by aligning incentives of all stakeholder, building capacity and gamification,” he added

Main highlights about engineering from the employability report

1. The report stated that only 3.84 percent of engineers in the country have the technical, cognitive and linguistic skills required for software-related jobs in start-ups.

2. Only 3 percent of engineers have new-age technological skills in the areas which are booming now such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science and mobile development.

3. Thus, only 1.7 percent of engineers have the skills needed to work in new age jobs.

4. The report provides the primary reasons for low employability of India’s engineers — only 40 percent engineering graduates do an internship, while a mere 7 percent students do multiple internships.

5. Apart from a lack of internships, engineers also have low employability because only 36 percent do projects beyond their curriculum. Thus, they don’t always build the skills to solve problems in a variety of situations.

6. Another problem adding to low employability of engineers is that the subject is taught in a very theoretical manner in colleges — 60 percent faculty doesn’t talk about application of concepts in the industry and only 47 percent of the engineers attend any industry talk.