97% Of Engineers In India Can’t Speak English; Less Than 20% Are Employable For IT Jobs

In India, around 600,000 engineers graduate annually from various colleges; while some of them chose the profession because of their engineering passion, some of them were pressurized from their parents.
But a new study has revealed that most of them aren't even qualified for a job in knowledge economy.
Aspiring Minds, a leading employability credentialing firm, has revealed that only 18.43% of all engineering graduates are eligible for a software engineer's job in India.

And the worst part is that such incompetency has nothing to do with their engineering skills: its their proficiency in English language & soft skills which makes them lose out on opportunities.

As Per their study, 97% of Indians engineers cannot speak English,which is one of the mandatory requirement for working in any software or IT firm. In fact, 67% of all engineers do not possess any English language skills (reading, speaking, comprehension), which are required for high-end job in business consulting, software, IT and other knowledge economy jobs.

It is a shocking reality indeed, which can have major implications on the current job market in the country.

These results were derived from two studies: 

a) ‘The National Spoken English Skills of Engineers Report’, where in English language skills were tested on 30,000 would be engineers from 500 engineering colleges across the nation

b) ‘National Employability Report for Engineering Graduates’, where in 1.2 lakh engineering students from 520 engineering colleges were surveyed for employability skills (which included logic, aptitude and more tests besides English language). This particular test was conducted on those students who passed out in 2013

Interesting facts from these studies:

• 91.82% of the students lacked programming and algorithm related skills
• 71.23% of the students lacked soft and cognitive skills
• 60% of the students lack domain skills (example civil engineering, mechanical engineering etc)
• 97% of the students cannot speak English which is required for getting a IT job
• 57.96% of students lacked analytical and quantitative skills
• 61% of students possess grammar skills which is almost equal to a class 7^thstudent
• Only 7.1% of students can speak English which is considered as meaningful, and presentable during an interview
• The major problem was witnessed with pronunciation, followed by fluency skills, grammar and sentence construction. Understanding spoken English and vocabulary showcased less problems
• Girls had better command over written English, while men were more proficient with spoken English (comparably)

Providing a possible explanation for these shocking results, Aspiring Minds CEO & Co-founder Himanshu Aggarwal said, “The low employability among engineering graduates is a cumulative outcome of poor education standards and higher demand of skilled employees thereby creating a drastic skill gap in the country,”

If we are assuming that this problem mainly exists in students from Tier 2 colleges, then we are wrong here. Even IITs and NITs are not spared, when it comes to English language skills.

Gautam Biswas, director, IIT Guwahati said, “We get students from different backgrounds and regions, and they are mostly not comfortable with English. Quite a few students appear for the joint entrance examination in their mother tongue. It becomes very difficult for them to follow the curriculum.”

Have we put too much focus on Maths, Science and Biology that we have left our students paralyzed when it comes to soft skills and English language proficiency?

UB Desai who is the director of IIT Hyderabad certainly thinks so. He said, “Over the years, the focus in the education system has shifted to chemistry, maths, physics. Focus on soft skills has reduced. Students may lose out on good job prospects as many companies come to campuses for global positions as well,”

As per Aspiring Minds, a fresher can easily lose 30-50% of salary, in case his English language and soft skills are below expectations.

[Sources: 1, 2, 3 | Image: WSJ]

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Facebook’s Predictive Analytics – A Love Story

Did you know that Facebook can look at its user’s posting patterns and moods in order to predict their future romantic relationships?

As a posting on the blog “Fierce Big Data” put it on February 19, 2014: “‘During the 100 days before the relationship starts, we observe a slow but steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the future couple,’ writes Facebook data scientist Carlos Diuk in his ‘The Formation of Love’ post.

‘When the relationship starts (day 0), posts begin to decrease. We observe a peak of 1.67 posts per day 12 days before the relationship begins, and a lowest point of 1.53 posts per day 85 days into the relationship. Presumably, couples decide to spend more time together, courtship is off and online interactions give way to more interactions in the physical world.’
Interesting….

Facebook As Cupid?

To put it another way, Facebook knows before you do when you are going to become a couple. It certainly knows long before you announce it on your relationship status.

What’s more, Facebook can tell when the physical part of your relationship begins because your online activity decreases. While Facebook diplomatically calls this phase “courtship” in the posts, but in reality the courtship actually occurred during the exchanges Facebook initially traced to accurately predict the relationship.
What value does tracking the love life of its users have for Facebook? Plenty! This information can be used to promote placement of marketing for everything from flowers to chocolates to condoms to lubricants and any other company that can profit from your being involved in a romantic and physical relationship.

Predicting Breakups

Facebook also can predict when your relationship is going to end – often before you do.

In a Facebook posting called “When Love Goes Awry,” which was published on the site on the day after Valentine’s Day, 2014, Facebook data scientist Adrien Figgeri wrote: “To conclude this week of celebrating love and looking at how couples blossom on Facebook, we felt it was important not to forget that unfortunately sometimes relationships go south and people take different paths in life. In this context, we were interested in understanding the extent to which Facebook provides a platform for support from loved ones after a breakup.”

“To that end, we studied a group of people who were on the receiving end of a separation, i.e. who had been in a relationship for at least four weeks with someone who then switched their relationship status to Single.”

“For every person in this group, we tracked a combination of the number of messages they sent and received, the number of posts from others on their timeline, and the number of comments from others on their own content, during a period starting a month before the separation to a month after.

“We observed a steady regime around the baseline before the day of the relationship status changes, followed by a discontinuity on that day with a +225% increase of the average volume of interactions which then gradually stabilize over the course of a week to levels higher to those observed pre-breakup.”

To translate, Facebook can accurately predict when your relationship is going to end long before you suspect anything is wrong. And you can be sure Facebook is using similar analysis to predict other intimate details about your life as well.

Facebook And The Possibilities Of Big Data  

Most people have no idea about Facebook’s date collection activities and data usage practices.Even if they have heard about it, they generally don’t care or see it as little more than a harmless annoyance. They mistakenly believe that as long as they don’t post anything of a highly personal or sensitive nature on their wall, Facebook’s practices can’t cause any harm to them.

Facebook isn’t alone in conducting wide-scale data harvesting. In fact, most corporations do it to some degree or another these days. While some of these efforts are indeed harmless, some are not. What's worse, at this point nobody knows how this data will be utilized in the future, or to whom it will be sold and for what purposes it is being purchased. Most people are legitimately concerned about the potential dangers of the government collecting large amounts of data on them, but they are blind to the dangers of private corporations doing the same thing.

This is a perfect example of how limited perception based on an individual's personal experience can cause ambiguity in the discussion of big data within and organization.

But Facebook's use of data offers an excellent opportunity to illustrate what is possible with big data, as well as what some of the potential dangers to privacy are. it can broaden the thinking of people at entry level within your organization.
This excerpt is from business2community. To view the whole article click here.

By: Troy Hollenbeck, President/CEO, Evolve Journal
Originally published at www.business2community.com