Role of Industries in Technical Institutions in India

Abstract:

This paper discusses about the role of Industries in Technical Institutions of India.For India to become economically strong & socially developed, education is crucial.Technical Institutions of India produces some of the talented & intelligent engineers but the real question that needs answer is “Are we producing quality engineers who can compete world-wide?”.Even students felt that their education lacked relevance to the jobs they were hoping to apply for in the future which reinforces the missing element "linking education to careers".Both the industries and technical institutions play a major part in addressing the problems of the society which would yield greater result if they both work in tandem.It will also help the technical institutes to mould the students as quality professional.

Introduction:

Education helps to increase people’s scope for opportunities.We live in knowledge-based environment driven by Information Technology.According to the latest report on the All India Survey on Higher Education, there are799 Universities, 39,701 colleges and 11,923 standalone institutions in India..Current system of education is such that knowledge is imparted on students to make them industry ready, thus only emphasis is on theoretical education rather than practical hands-on education.

How are we going to produce engineers with practical thinking?There is a need for smart class-room wherein students get exposed to hands-on experience,which would make students understand the concept by relating to real-world & also enables students to implement the theoretical concepts they learned in classroom.

Students will be inquisitive to learn many concepts but the pressure of academic environment that imparts theoretical knowledge hinders the opportunity.

Recent trends in the academy have been characterized by one or more of the following factors:

lMore participation of students in higher education, trend is rising from 5% of the population 50 years ago to over 50% today.

Higher education awareness must reach everyone by increasing marketization.

There is a need to generate more income to meet funding demands

There is a need to bring the interaction closer by setting up of more research and development activities.

Need for Industry- Institute interaction:

Every year approximately 2 Million Engineers pass out in India,out of which only a few are getting hired.Of which only 25-35 % are getting a job with good salary and 15-24% get job with entry level salary which is low and this trend stagnates for around 4-5 years.

IT and the Manufacturing sector are the two major industries that hire engineers.

The IT industry in India, which grew by as much as 30% up till five years back, has slowed down to a 10.2% growth rate at present. The demand for qualified professionals in the field has understandably gone down too.

The main reason for this low hiring percentage could be attributed to the below skills that the new graduates lack:

Plenty of newly minted members of the workforce think they are well prepared for a guaranteed success. However managers aren’t convinced.

Managers and employees never get many chances to have face-to-face interaction.

A new report from PayScale, a provider of on-demand compensation data and software, in partnership with Future Workplace, an executive development firm, reveals that while 87% of recent graduates feel well prepared to hit the ground running after earning their diplomas, only half of hiring managers agree with them.This isn’t totally surprising.Recent studies reveal that underemployment was the reality for more than half (51%) of those who graduated in the past two years.

Some of the skills that the hiring managers expect that the graduates lack are unexpected:

1. Critical Thinking
2. Problem Solving abilities
3. Writing proficiency
4. Soft Skills such as communication,leadership,ownership & teamwork are missing

Most sought after skills are:

Skills that gets biggest pay bumps for workers are emerging in IT Field.

Web development, Ruby, Cloud will get the highest pay boost (approx. 23% increase in earnings), followed by CISCO UCCE/IPCC at 21.6 % and GO Programming language at 20.3%.

65% percent of managers who are millennials themselves believed graduates are prepared to enter the workforce versus 47% of gen Xers and 48% of boomers.

Modes of Interaction Between the Academy and Industry

Industries can interact with the academic institutions in the below modes:

Consultancy:

Faculties does external work for a company for which they are paid.

This also gives faculties enough opportunity to collaborate with industries in their areas of domain.It gives Industries to outsource some of their Research & Development requirements to various academic institutions which also helps the faculties and students to understand various skills practically.

Research and Development

Institutions can set up various R&D labs such as Science & Technology park with the help of industries.By this way industries can also outsource some of their smaller projects to academic Institutions which enables collaboration and innovation.

This collaboration may enable local partners to benefit from physical co-location.

A survey carried out by CBI and Pearson Education found that more than two thirds (70%) of the businesses had developed links of some kind with universities, while nearly half (48%) were looking to grow their university ties in the future.

However the trend is changing due to number of factors such as:

Decline in funding for research activities ( for Ex : UK research funding is below 0.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)).

Internships

In 2015-16, 56% students graduating from engineering colleges remained unemployed.”In a move aimed at improving their employability prospects, engineering students across the country will have to undergo at least three mandatory internships during their course from this academic year. It will be the responsibility of colleges to ensure internship for students”, HRD Minister Shri Prakash Javadekar told in Lok Sabha.

Internships also gives practical experience to the students offered by industries for a fixed term.Internship is normally offered to the undergraduate students.

Internships comes in two ways:

1. Full-time
2. Part-time for a fixed period , say 6 months or 12 months.

Some industries also give stipend to the internee. Internships help students to learn the practical impact of their study and also get acclimatized to a specific industry. It gives them the opportunity to apply the theoretical knowledge.

Benefits of Internships:

a. Out of syllabus knowledge— Students are not provided with any syllabus to complete.They learn practical syllabus.

b. Seeing is believing — Students also gets a chance to develop products that the customer expects.The contribution is often measurable and tangible

c .In internship the students get practical exposure to the theoretical knowledge which they studied in the classrooms.

d. They also get a chance to learn about themselves and they get many networks which can enhance their Communication

e. In an internship, the students are given the chance to showcase their skills, talents, commitment, and value to a prospective employer.

What internee learns in a month internship gives far more experience than the learning from syllabus in college.

Industrial Trips:

Educational Institutes also adopts Industrial trips as a value-added method of learning.Textbook learning never gives the required skills for an engineer to become a professional.They do not suffice for holistic learning.

Hands-on learning gives better understanding of business processes and technological applications.Objective of Industrial trips provides an insight into the internal working of industries.It also gives academic perspective.

Benefits of Industrial Visits:

• Industrial visits help students gain hands-on experience of how industry operations are executed.
• It bridges the gap between theoretical training and practical training in real-life environment.
• With industry visits, students will be able to better identify their prospective areas of work in the overall organizational function.
• Students become more aware of technological applications, business processes.
• It also gives them a chance to develop their soft-skills.

Promotion of strategic academic collaborations in Germany

In Germany, temporary or longer-term oriented forms of collaboration of German companies with universities and non-university research institutes can be observed since the mid-2000s. Their aim is to carry out joint research activities in areas strategically important for the companies in a medium to long term perspective (Koschatzky and Stahlecker -2010).These developments are reflected in the R&D expenditures in German industry.Since the mid-1990s, these expenditures increased significantly (from 30 billion Euro in 1995 to about 57.5 billion Euro in 2010). In parallel, also the external R&D expenditures increased (from about 3.5 billion Euros in 1995 to about 10 billion Euro in 2010). The external R&D expenditures represent the R&D activities which are funded by companies but not performed in-house. They are thus an expression of the division of labor in R&D and respective outsourcing processes by which complex innovation projects are characterized nowadays. Affiliated enterprises mostly benefit from this kind of outsourcing, but also linkages to the science sector have intensified since the early 2000s. The German innovation policy responds to these developments by two big funding schemes of the Ministry of Education and Research, which additionally reflect the political focus on the regional level. The first is the leading-edge cluster competition, which was launched in 2007 with its first round. Its major objective is to establish strategic partnerships between science and industry and the generation of innovations in future technological fields that are outlined in the high-tech strategy of the German government.

The Research Campus (Forschungscampus) program (RCP) initiated in 2012 is the most recent and certainly one of the most ambitious initiatives addressing the regional function of universities in Germany.

The RCP features a combination of three distinct characteristics:

• Proximity – the bundling of research activities and competencies at one location, as possible on a university or public research campus.
• The medium- to long-term adaptation of a specific research topic, ideally within a research program.
• A mandatory public-private partnership.