ADOPT QUALITY MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE IN EMPLOYABILITY OF ENGINEERING GRADUATES OF INDIA

Abstract

Globalised industrial production has opened-up large employment opportunities across industry verticals across, while throwing lots of challenges on the Industries in getting the products early to the market by leveraging latest cutting-edge technologies from every domains of engineering and at the same time being 'cost competitive' for their survival. Under the dynamic market with cost pressures, expectations of the industries across the globe is that, the fresh graduates hired from the educational institutions are 'job-ready' while offering lots of employment opportunities for young engineers graduating and more specifically in India. It is estimated in India that, the automotive industrial sector alone would create 48 million job opportunities by 2022. To meet this demand Indian education system in the last few decades has undergone accelerated growth and is equipped to produce 1.4 million engineering graduates across the Nation for employment. However, there appears to be huge un-met expectations of the employers on the employability of fresh engineering graduates, resulting in huge percentage of engineering graduates are not, either 'job ready 'or 'employable' as perceived by the employers. Issue of employability is a complex problem and requires a multi-pronged approach across all domains of engineering. This research work is more specific to mechanical engineering under graduate students, to understand and analyse the reasons for such a lower employability, by considering employers' perspective of employability as a defect in educational process. This research work attempts to leverage the successful six sigma quality management approach adopted by the Industry in addressing their process defects, by considering educational institutions similar to process industry. The scope of this research work is to identify issues which are like low hanging fruits and suggest solutions that would make significant impact on the employability as perceived by employers.