The talent shortage is acute in the IT and data science ecosystem in
India with a survey claiming that 95 per cent of engineers in the
country are not fit to take up software development jobs.
According to a study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds,
only 4.77 per cent candidates can write the correct logic for a
programme — a minimum requirement for any programming job.
Over 36,000 engineering students from IT related branches of over 500
colleges took Automata — a Machine Learning based assessment of software
development skills — and over 2/3 could not even write code that
compiles.
The study further noted that while more than 60 per cent candidates
cannot even write code that compiles, only 1.4 per cent can write
functionally correct and efficient code.
“Lack of programming skills is adversely impacting the IT and data
science ecosystem in India. The world is moving towards introducing
programming to three-year-old! India needs to catch up,” Aspiring Minds
CTO and co-founder Varun Aggarwal said.
The employability gap can be attributed to rote learning based
approaches rather than actually writing programmes on a computer for
different problems. Also, there is a dearth of good teachers for
programming, since most good programmers get jobs in industry at good
salaries, the study said.
Moreover, programming skills are five times poorer for tier III colleges
as compared to tier 1 colleges. “Sixty nine per cent of candidates from
top 100 colleges are able to write a compilable code versus rest of the
colleges where only 31 per cent are able to write a compilable code,”
the report said.
