With tepid campus hiring due to macro headwinds being faced by IT companies, engineering colleges are upgrading their course structure to focus on areas like artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductor designing, cloud technology, and more. Institutes and colleges FE spoke with said that such courses will provide students skill sets which have market demand and hence make them more employable.
For instance, Punjab Engineering College and Cadence Design Systems last week signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to provide students hands-on experience in Cadence’s cutting-edge computational software technology
Baldev Setia, director at PEC, said: “This collaboration will bridge the gap between academia and industry
Similarly, the computer science and engineering department of Bengaluru-based PES University has started courses on generative AI which has gained immense popularity in the industry.
The National Institute of Engineering (NIE), Mysuru, has also beefed up its skill enhancement programme. Harshith Diwakar, training and placement officer at NIE, said that the institute has collaborated with Coursera to upskill students on advanced and emerging technologies.
Ankit Aggarwal, founder and CEO, Unstop, a platform that connects talent, colleges and recruiters and which counts Coursera as one of its investors, said that companies now don’t want to spend time and resources on training and require ‘readymade’ talent.
Unstop has started a programme whereby students can get some mentoring sessions from relevant seasoned and experienced industry employees.
Bhavesh Goswami, founder and CEO, CloudThat, a B2B cloud and AI training startup, said the institute created a new vertical last year to collaborate with colleges to train and upskill students. “Today, IT companies are getting raw talent from colleges. They train them for six months to one-and-a-half years and then deploy them on projects. They don’t stay beyond a year. So, the companies are now asking colleges to give them trained hands,” Goswami of CloudThat said.
Yogesh Kumar, programme coordinator at GD Goenka University, Noida, said the institute has collaborated with CloudThat to equip the faculty with the essential knowledge required to navigate the dynamic field of Microsoft
According to Sanjay Bhandari, training and placement officer, Jodhpur Institute of Engineering & Technology, Rajasthan, “given the current business landscape and the market
The institute has also started taking help of CloudThat to make students not just employable but also increasingly competitive.
Cloud technology trainers say the technology now extends to disciplines like business administration (BBA) and humanities. For instance, colleges are now enhancing the skills of BBA and other non-tech students in cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, such as Microsoft Dynamics.
Sunil C, CEO, TeamLease Digital, said many colleges have mandated pre-placement training for seventh-semester students, encompassing a 60-hour blend of offline and online courses covering aptitude and professional skills such as C, C++, Java and Python. He added that students are being asked to take up 5-6 certification courses on emerging technologies and the fee is negotiated between service providers and the colleges.
Today, many AWS certification courses such as solutions architect, cloud practitioner, developer, machine learning and AI, are getting integrated into the curriculum and internship modules of several colleges, including Amity School of Engineering & Technology, Anna University, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (Pilani), CMR Institute of Technology, Christ University, Galgotias University, Institute of Engineering & Management, and many others, Sunil added.
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