Industry seeks students with good skill sets apart from strong basics

Hyderabad: While stressing that students should have good basics, industry experts are of the view that skill eduction should be made a key part of the curriculum. However, there are others who believe that strong basics should never be ignored in the quest to provide students short-term skills for industry's requirements.
"Fundamentals are indeed very important, but so are skills.The focus should be on both. Unfortunately, our academia is concentrating more on fundamentals," said M Sesha Rao, executive director of Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association (HYSEA).
He, however, added that eventually it is the varsities which should be the judge of what needs to be included in the curriculum.
"Industry looks at short term. You cannot blame them as it is their need. So, academia should closely work with the industry and take a call on what needs to be added. They need to be flexible and make changes as the need arises instead of saying curriculum will be changed once in three years or five years," he said.
With technology rapidly changing everything, industry experts also wanted all emerging techs such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud computing and blockchain among others added to the engineering curriculum as they are needed in all domains, including core engineering. According to them, these subjects can be offered as electives initially and added to the core curriculum later.
A few, however, pointed out that instead of turning varsities into skill centres, the focus should be on giving students strong basics so that they can learn anything.
"Just because the industry doesn't want to spend three months training a student, universities can't be turning into skill centres. A coaching institute is enough for that. Our curriculum is not outdated. We need to focus on fundamentals. In fact, we still teach our students C programming as it is a great language to start programming with and our students are one of the best Python programmers in the country even though we don't teach Python," said Ramesh Loganathan, professor, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH).
He said that concentrating on skills will be an extremely myopic way of looking at education. Instead, outdated syllabi can be deleted, especially in core engineering – civil, mechanical, and electrical – and the subject made interesting to create engineers in design, propulsion, civil, automotive, telecom etc., he said.