Dec 10: In a recently held Webinar on “Skiled Resources. A Quandary An Electronics Industry Perspective” organized by the Confederation of Indian MSME in ESDM & IT (CIMEI), The various problems and solutions were discussed related to the Huge gap in the supply and demand of skilled resources that industries are facing especially in the Electronics Industry.
The webinar saw the participation and representation from Industry, Academia and Government which included Mr. Sanjeev Keskar (President CIMEI), Capt. Kaustav Nath (Head NSDC operations Karnataka, Goa & Tripura), Mr. Saleem Ahmed (VP ESSCI), Ms. Shubha Sunil (Jt. Secretary – Skill development, Compliance and IT, CIMEI), Dr. Santosh K Vishwakarma ( Associate Professor IIT Indore), Mr. Srinath Rao (HR Consultant) and Mr. Jairaj Srinivas (Director General, CIMEI)
“The electronics sector has a huge demand for skilled manpower, and currently, this industry is facing shortage of skilled manpower in the emerging sectors like IoT, Industry 4.0, Embedded Design and other new age economy skill sets. To capture this need of the industry and prepare the manpower as per the current and next-generation job roles, the Confederation of Indian MSME in ESDM and IT is looking forward to work with ESSCI and NSDC and other stakeholder in line with the advanced technologies like IoT, Embedded system & Semiconductor and EMS.” says Mr. Sajeev Keskar, President, CIMEI.
Current Situation
We have an education model where we churn out students from ITI, Diploma & Degree colleges (institutions) in various streams / skills. There is also a dedicated stream for electronics. The quandary is that most electronics engineering graduates don’t even look upto electronics industry as an option. The cream from the electronics industry prefers to move into IT. This leaves the industry to pick from the remaining lot who too are not passionate to get into the electronics industry to make their career. Here, one can’t blame the education system alone as industry too has a role to play to make the industry attractive for the graduates however, we will keep the latter part for some other day.
- An electronics Engg. graduate or diploma doesn’t get to see a SMT machine, reflow oven or an AOI machine during their curriculum which their mechanical cousins do. This is where the problem starts. Now if a person doesn’t even know what happens in the electronics industry & how the production takes place, how Is he even going to be passionate about it?
- The other quandary is that the industry hires as per their departments while the education system churns out people sector wise. This mismatch in demand vs supply must be addressed quickly & that is where the education
system needs an overhaul or at least a dramatic change.
The above two factors force industry is a biggest hurdle while recruiting freshers because it costs time & money to train the freshers in the areas that the organization. As a result of this, industry is forced to hire experienced folks into their organizations which obviously spikes the cost.
This is precisely where we get to hear reports that India has only 10-15% employable & so on.
Proposed Solution
- Changes in the education system –
- Get inputs from industry on the curriculum
- This curriculum must include all aspects of the sector.
- Incorporating the current Skilling content into the curriculum –
- If the govt believes the content of the current skilling up program is the way forward, then why not incorporate it into the curriculum itself?
Advantages
- These changes can significantly improve the employability of our youth.
- Industry can then look to hire freshers into their team without any additional cost on training, and our product costs will come down drastically.
- Product quality will improve significantly
- Experienced resources can then be deployed for more innovative & higher returns activities.
- It will make us a more cost competitive & a high quality product, boost our chances for more exports & more business coming into the country.
