Six Sigma Methodology for Addressing Employability Issue of Engineering Graduates

Abstract

Higher Educational Institutions in general and more specifically Professional Institutions like Engineering Institutions under the Globalised Industrial Scenario, advancements in Technology, multi domain involvement in product development, demanding expectations from customers and stake holders, face multiple challenges of delivering Quality Students as their output, who are employable, able to apply their learnings from academics either to the real life applications of new product development or apply their knowledge in solving some of the quality issues in the product or process or carry forward their learnings towards Research. This trend results in employability issues, low graduation rates and survival of the Institutions themselves.Quality of outputs from the academic Institutions in the form of students and their lower level of employability not only raises the question on very existence of academic Institutions and formal educationsystemitself for common good of the society. Most of the Educational Institutions have adopted and Implemented ISO Standards like ISO 9001:2008 and is found to be extensively useful and delivered its benefits on educational curriculum and process. But the employability has not increased amongst students, as focus of the ISO standard is Quality System process and not to act as a measurement metric for quality to Bench Mark current levels and to set target goals for improvement like Six Sigma, one the popular Quality Initiative embraced by Industries. This paper brings out Six Sigma model to address the “Employability” issues more specifically to Engineering Graduates. It has been included within the scope of the paper to critically review the published literatures on Six Sigma Implementation to educational systemsand attempts have been made to make value additions to the existing work as appropriate.