Since last few weeks, few questions were troubling me.

“Do students really not care about their careers?

Are they really not motivated to learn and give due attention to studies while they are in colleges / universities?” 

To find an answer to this question, we decided socialize with few students.

Thanks to the enthusiastic support of the faculty of SICSR, Pune, we were able to have an access to few students and chat with them for few hours in different groups. Me, along with few of my interested friends had discussion with few enthusiastic students trying to understand what is the root cause of above questions.

Despite relative small group of varied backgrounds, we could uncover few important aspects of the student behavior and the related perception by the teachers.  This article, hopefully, will make an attempt to shed some light on some of them.

What does a career mean to the students in professional courses ?

We met two different types of students. One set with no prior work experience but with a bachelor degree, and other set with having professional work experience and with a bachelor degree.

What they think is missing ?

Students felt there is a gap of understanding in what happens within the IT industry and what kind of profiles are available for them when they will essentially be eligible for job placements.   They also were not aware of what kind of work will be expected out of them when they join their respective companies after placements.

Many students, proactively, reached out to the college seniors to seek this information, but apparently did not get right information back that could help them make informed choices about their careers.

They lacked the thinking the short term and long term vision about their career. No one could answer where they would see themselves in 3-5 years time.  They were also not sure which career option will give them better prospects in their future.

One of the interesting facts we found that the people who had work experience, were NOT open to share their understanding of IT industry with their fellow students.  Surprising, but since all of them were supposedly competitors with each other in the job market, they felt that not sharing information will give them upper hand.

Are you ready for working hard to achieve dream ?

We spoke to the students about how and why it is important to see the big picture of the career from the point of view of achieving a dream. More importantly rather, why its essential to have a dream in life for career.

While most of the students understood the need of having a career goal, according to one’s natural ability they found it hard to resist small gains. For example a student whose dream was to be an IT Marketing Manager, could not resist the temptation of accepting a job of IT analyst with very high salary and attractive package.

Students also acknowledged that the gap between dream and reality came due to lack of understanding of what lies behind the scenes of these attractive packages.  When we asked them to list out what they think why people are not ready to put in hard work and long term vision in planning their careers, few answers we got were –

• Probably it is true to certain extent that new generation of students are relatively lacking the passion to learn
• Students want quick money, higher roles, better positions
• Goals were always short term (getting admission to certain school, getting certain percentages, getting a job etc) than long term
• Peer pressure affected the choices e.g., my friend got a job in XYZ company with $$$ salary, I would do everything to get better !
• For students with service background job security was very important (they would rather join a stable company with some less money than more challenging role with higher salary)
• Moreover, one of the most prominent answer we got “Students were confused and did not know what is right for them in their career.” There are simply too many choices around !!!

These few discussions we did with students actually opened our eyes to the other side of world and how students felt about their own careers.  The most important part from our side was the interest shown by few students who turned up for discussions to open up and share their side of stories. 

It now convinces me that the problem I talked about in my previous post, may not be that serious after all !!

There is a hope, big hope !!

In my previous posts on this series, I touched upon the viewpoint I had towards industry and how I felt during various stages of my engineering student life. How I was keen on knowing more on the other side of world i.e., the industry and corporate world and how keen I was to get into my professional life.

To know more on how the thinking of the students have evolved over all these years since I left college, I made an attempt to connect with professors of few institutes. One of them was the NIT (Formerly REC), one premier college in Pune and other one in my home town. Three different tiers of the colleges and expectedly three different tiers of students studying in them.

Initial Expectations

My initial expectation across these students (before I actually spoke with the professors) were as follows,

I am sure most of you would envisage the students in these colleges probably on the similar lines as what I mentioned above, may be with a little difference somewhere.

Reality is different

Further to my discussions with the institute professors to understand more about the students and their behavior towards learning, two things came out as a common pattern

• Decreased tendency of proactive learning and laziness towards working hard
• High expectations towards results (getting job, salaries etc)

Lets look at the common patterns found during the discussions with the professors. Not necessary they are the only patterns found, but they are all very common patterns in the student behavior.

In general, all the professors expressed their worry and helplessness towards diverting student interest towards more involved learning.

Professors of the NIT & the engineering college of Pune feel that the real cause behind this is as follows,

• Corporates are in a great need of talent hence availability of jobs is not a problem
• There is a scarcity of “employable” resources around and the hence recruitment happens in numbers
• Companies are preferring ‘quantity’ over ‘quality’
• From the student perspective, the jobs are easily available and once the job is secured through campus placement, there is very little for the student to achieve apart from ensuring that certain percentage is achieved in the final year
• Students are easily influenced and unable to decide their priorities

They all feel this is a bigger problem currently faced by education institutes all over India. I am unsure of how things are in IITs but now, I would not be surprised to know they are no different .. !

We do have a real problem at our hands ..

This is the third article in the series of articles I am writing on my views on the education in India.  In both the previous articles, I wrote little stories about my own feeling and thinking during the time I was student.

Here is another little story. This time, about the choices in life we have to make as a student. Most importantly, about the career choices.

I would again like to take you back to my student days when I was in the MNREC, studying the Computer science engineering. I was in 3rd year and as a part of our group discussions within my GD group, another topic we used to touch was the “dream company” and where each one of us would fit in, eventually, knowing our capabilities.  Obviously, in the 3rd year of our engineering, none of us knew what was in store for all of us, including the future employers or the work we wanted to do in our life. In fact, we knew a little about the software industry and what kind of work happens once you go in the corporate world.

The introduction of the IT industry for all of us was one where you do lot of programming and you must have great logic and problem solving skills.

Partly right, because even today, majority of the software industry is driven by developers and they drive the industry forward. However, its equally true that software industry does not only consists of developers !!

When we entered into final year and the companies started rushing in our college to do campus interviews, we started to understand few rules of the games that probably sounded little bit confusing to me. Some of the most notable were as follows,

• All the companies essentially had a cut off by percentage for the people who could actually be eligible to apply
• Most of the companies chose to only opt for Computer Science and Electronic engineering students and other stream students were not allowed to sit for the exams
• Aptitude tests were compulsory for most of the companies and again, there was a cut off with passing percentage

Eventually I got through a top MNC and was placed in one of their offices. When I entered the corporate world along with few of my friends, we found ourselves “grouped” into technology verticals based on our academic record.  All the students who had computer science or electronics engineering background, were grouped into “Open source” or “web technologies” group. All the students who had non-CSE background were grouped under “legacy” or “Mainframe” technology group

Once the grouping happened, the related entry level training started. After a month of rigorous training, we all were placed on live projects eventually.  Over a period of time, few new people from either of groups could not survive and had to leave the company because company thought they could not perform up to their expectation level.

If you have read the story carefully, you would have known the following facts,

• The hiring company has strict eligibility criteria so only “good” students could be filtered through
• Only good students eventually got the job through aptitude, group discussions and interview filtering criteria
• The hiring company decided who goes in which group based on their academic background (i.e., open source vs mainframe)
• The hiring company put expectations on the employees and raised the bar based on the training provided against specific “technologies”
• When few people failed, they were shown the door out
• Remember, all were excellent students !!

So, where do you think things would have gone wrong ! We had good students with very good academic records selected through a stringent criteria.

In my opinion, the we have two fold problem here.

1. General lack of awareness about career options within IT field (development, support, maintenance, testing, process management etc)

2. Generic assumption by employers that everyone is fit to do everything

The first problem is about making students aware of the opportunities that lie within the corporate world that are not “development” kind of jobs. 

Awareness about career choices is a key issue we currently face in the premier institutes. The students tend to choose their career by the name of the hiring company, than the the work they would eventually want to do and would enjoy more.

I have seen students who are very good academically but not so good programmers. Their strength was in their analysis of situation and power to remember things and follow certain laid out procedures. These people could make an excellent career in “testing field”.  Similarly someone who is keen to explore new stuff and learn more each time and think out of box could be very good for “Research & development & innovation cells”.  Some people who have shown good organization and management skills they can rather build their career around program management etc.

Not everyone is born to be a developer !

The second problem only compliments the first one by giving both corporate businesses and students a platform to prove the mismatch.  It is obvious that the student who is not so good in problem solving techniques and algorithm building, can not be a good programmer. 

The companies today pay huge money to do the campus recruitment and hire top talent. Unfortunately, if the fitment between the type of person (student) and does not happen, the person eventually leaves in a year or two out of frustration and looks for change.  This means that these companies are more often than not are tend to lose money that they have invested in these people before getting full recovery out.

I know it is a complex problem and we may not have a ready solution for this but I think it is worth considering.

What do you think ?