Was I “JOB” ready?

Over the years, I have been reading multiple reports, surveys and opinion pieces on the employment readiness of an under-graduate/ graduate.

That set me thinking.

I graduated at the top of my university with a BE degree in 1998, majoring in Mechanical Engineering where I also read something related to Microprocessor Architecture and Programing in C. Was I ready to be employed as a Software Engineer at one of the outsourcing majors?

The answer was big No. And how did the s/w companies hire – it was a written test followed by an interview where you were thrown a few puzzles from the books written by Shakuntala Devi, so much that it became the Gita for the 4th year engineering students in addition to the book “Word Power made easy” by Norman Lewis that the GRE takers swore by and thereby many Mechanical Engineers did become Software Engineers. Were they ready to work on software development projects.

The answer was big No.

Then came the Training programs. Hired for capability and trained for the skills required was the standard. ?A 3-6 month training program in Mysore or Trivandrum or elsewhere helped the fresh hires gain the programming skills required. All the hires were tested was on “thinking”, that’s were solving those puzzles came into play.

The joke in campus in late 90’s was that the outsourcing majors came to Tier-1 campuses with Buses produced by TELCO to hire, while TELCO went empty handed. With the lure of a possible on-site (and ESOPs in some cases) they displaced the traditional companies (from L&T to Telco/ Tisco).

As software hiring picked up, to augment supply of talent we had programs like G-NIIT and the likes that many pursued along with under-graduation (more so if one was from non-engineering background), while some of the science u/grads did a 3 year MCA. Did that make them job ready. Probably.

Lets take a detour here.

Fast forward to 2000. I graduated from Bharathidasan Institute of Management Tiruchirapalli with an MBA and was placed in erstwhile IDBI, a Financial Institution in Mumbai. The day I landed – I was enlisted for an Advisory Engagement – “Business & Financial Restructuring of a Coal Company” at Ranchi (wish I went to the cricket matches, may be I could have seen the young MS Dhoni belt those sixes), an engagement that was funded by #WorldBank and to be done in partnership with a Big 4 firm.

Was I ready? NO. Clueless to be honest.

So what did my boss do? He was a 1970s IIMAhd grad (and had he chosen Physics over Finance, he would have probably become a professor at Caltech or MIT, the choices Sheldon Cooper had) and he requested a former team mate of his (then working in Hyderabad) to join the engagement at Ranchi, with one incidental objective was that I be trained. We spent countless hours working at our Ranchi office as well as at BNR Hotel, a remnant of the British Raj. End of the day – I became good at Financial Modelling!

While MBA gives one the tools in isolation, it is the first job that gives you the perspective to apply them in real live cases.

Fast forward to 2006.

Huffing and puffing thro, I graduated from University of Chicago Master of Science in Financial Mathematics , a 9 month intense professional masters program. It was a program that was more of a boot camp. True to what you might have heard, UChicago was a place where “Fun comes to die”. Most of the class that graduated with me in Jun 2006, was placed in Risk, while I managed to get into an Hedge Fund in their investment team.

Now was I ready.

Yes & No.

With respect to traditional investing – YES. Given that I had spent a good 5 years in FSA/ Valuations/ Distressed Debt/ Advisory etc.

With respect to Quantitative investing – NO.

It was learning on the job. While the firm did not require or demand that skill, I wanted to develop it and spent time outside of regular work. Make no mistake – UChicago gave me the tools, but I had to put them together and make sense.

In most cases the learning happened on the job – the first few months or the first couple of engagements as an understudy.

Now coming back to the noise on employability of a fresh graduate, it just not make sense.

As a prospective Engineering u/graduate in 1998, when I was looking for choices in 1997 or so, I came across this term called “Engineering Trainee”. In most companies it was a 1 year program that immersed you into gaining skills required to undertake the task. In essence a transition period from theory to practice. Most of the companies do not expect much from the ETs in the first year. Many current CEOs of large industrial companies might have started in the shop floor or Engineering group (rare) as ETs and might not have even switched jobs.

And I started as a Management Trainee with IDBI in 2000, a year of on the job training to make me do what is required at work. Many MNC banks have this too. While they do not call it as “Trainee”, they may have a rotation program for Year 1 analysts. And none of them really complain that the freshers are not job ready.

They are not expected to be!

A typical engineering company hires differently – ITI trade certificate holders (K10+3), Diploma holders from Polytechnics (K12+3) and Engineers (K12+4). How they are trained is very different. While ITI trains K10 students to become skilled technicians (say a welder or a fitter or a machinist) and they are ready from Day 1, a BE graduate is trained to think on solving problems and usually will not be job ready on Day 1. [And if you are looking for a value in Engineering graduate, you need to hire from the Polytechnics – many of them are better than engineering graduates. My dad is one that worked in BHEL from 1966 and took early retirement in 2000]. Hence a typical engineering enterprise does not complain. Their hiring and training process is capable of handling this.

If you ask a seasoned Human Resources executive on what he/ she considers as the most crucial aspect of his work – most of them would say “Training & Development”.

Somewhere along the line the Software services folks missed this. When the demand far outstripped supply, from hiring with a bus, they started hiring with 16 bogie train consist. With that came a probable drop in quality in hiring. The engineering seats as a % of K-10 passouts (not K-12) went up significantly (Is there any time series data set on % of K-10 students pursuing engineering and I think over years we might have seen a significantly altered statistical distribution). To give a perspective, when it comes to Engineering, the state of Tamil Nadu as a state had <10k seats in 1994 and in 2024 its over 300k seats (or thereabouts). Similar could be the story in other states too! The net effect of this is a deflation in value of the u/grad engineer, a graduate with no real problem solving skills. While it offers opportunities to a bigger population, a welcome changes, its also the case that most of the kids that would have otherwise pursued a job oriented Diploma given their capabilities are choosing engineering driven by family pressure. A parent wants the best for the kids, something that he/ she did not have. But is Engineering really the best is a question most parents do not (want to) ask.

What has happened over time is a watering down of the coursework of BE program in CS related disciplines with the noise that the “recruiters” make, forgetting their role in “training & development”. In the 90’s a student had to do more and take up coursework in 3rd party training centers to gain programming skills, while retaining the core of Engineering, its not the case anymore. Now a typical u/grad from a Tier II/III/IV engineering college may not posses the same attributes of someone that graduated in 80’s (I graduated in ’98, and probably did not posses the same qualities of someone from 60 or 70’s).

While the role today in one of the outsourcing sweat shops may not require an “Engineering Degree”. But helps to have a population of u/grads in Engineering to pitch to the client and for obtaining ?work visas overseas. Corporations like Zoho have pioneered a differentiated employee base with a mix of K-12, u/grads etc required to do the task and I do not see them complaining!

Look at another data set – the utilization rates in software services cos – it used to be in mid-high 70’s in the past to around 99.99% now. So it is likely that not much time is being spent on training. They have shifted the burden of training away from them driven by margin concerns. A student that is expected to learn engineering for 4 years is now learning for lot less than that and is training to do what a coding/ testing sweat shop would want him to do!

And when that task is taken up by Gen AI or automated in some form, what would he/ she do. Most of the sweat shops would use a mix of Gen AI and people to deliver the outcome. This may make the lower quartile engineering graduates completely irrelevant, if not made one already.

Getting someone job ready is not the responsibility of the universities, but tooling them is. Its time the large employers take up their role in Training & Development as seriously as they take up Recruitment. Else pay up to hire laterally. Both have margin impact.

I am not discussing the job readiness of the BCom/ BMS grads as the core of their task at work has not changed. Fortunately an engineering u/grad can do that do, as I come across employees in financial services doing the tasks that is expected of Commerce u/grads.

Its time we relooked our u/grad engineering curriculum and ensured it had the tools to succeed and transfer the burden of training to the employers!

I should not be expected to be ready when I come out of my u/grad program, but I should have the attitude to learn!

What do you think?