26. Enhancing Employability Skills of Engineering Graduates

The present job scenario demands the workforce to be competitive and well-groomed in all the areas related to hard core technical skills as well as soft skills. “Skills refer to the level of performance of an individual on a particular task or the capability to perform a job well which can be divided into technical elements and behavioral elements” (Noe et al. 2015). Soft skills are the skills, which complement hard skills such as interpersonal communication competence, ability to work in teams, motivation, leadership, etc. As per the recent data LinkedIn’s ‘2019 Global Talent Trends Report’ “as automation and AI continue to reshape entire industries, companies and jobs, strong soft skills—the one thing that machines can’t replace—are becoming absolutely vital” (Saira 2019).

Hence, comprehensive education curriculum should be the focus of the Educational Institutes in the present scenario. There are organizations whose sole criteria for hiring the professionals is based more on skill sets relevant to a particular profession evaluating an individual on parameters such as attitude, leadership, motivation, team work, persuasive strategies to deal with people, communication skills, emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, conflict management, etc. However, it is hard to quantify these traits in an individual but certainly adequate training should be provided to inculcate such attributes among the aspiring professionals. Despite the awareness of the expectations of the firms not many educational institutes offer structured courses in the desired area of people skills. There exists a gap between the expectations of the corporate sector and the modules designed by the academic sector. The growing trend of soft skills training sometimes fail in instilling an urgency among engineering students as they still consider completing the basic educational requirement as the benchmark. Büth et al. (2017) quote the AICTE, Placement, Graduates, Enrolments and Intake Statistics of Engineering Education in India.

“The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) statistics show that the enrolment of youth for technical courses in India is lower than the available capacity and less than 40% of the graduating students get jobs in industry. This clearly shows a mismatch between the industry requirements and academic skill development” (Büth 2017).

However, a few educational institutions include such courses as essential components in their academic structure and BITS Pilani being one of the leading educational institutions in India place a lot of importance to such courses. The course business communication taken up for analysis in this paper is a well-established course initiated in the year 2002 and since then it has been a highly popular course among the student community. The main objective of the paper is to share the teaching modules included in the course structure and the positive impact on the learning outcome of the students.

In BITS Pilani, several courses dealing with soft skills have been the essential part of the education curricula such as business communication, technical communication, etc. All these courses have all the desired soft skills components in their structure where students acquire significant training in all the people skills relevant to their job profile. Though all these courses have their specific objectives, this paper would confine its discussion to only Business communication.

Hard core skills are the skill sets relevant to a particular discipline but soft skills are a set of traits required for imparting a wholesome education to a professional wherein he is not only a computer engineer or a mechanical engineer but a technical graduate with a perfect hold on his dealings with the professional world and hence can be a good leader, a motivator and a person having all the necessary attributes which enable him to deliver his best in the job scenario. As defined by Hargis, technical skills are also termed as hard skills, and are “job specific tasks directly necessary for successful completion of the job,” for example, electricity, robotics, and computer technology (Hargis 2011).

Various studies have been conducted which highlight the role of soft skills also known as Employability skills for a technical professional and Chaita explains employability skills as “thinking skills such as logical and analytical reasoning; problem solving; capacity to identify access and manage knowledge and information; personal attributes such as imagination; creativity and intellectual rigor; values such as ethical practice, persistence, integrity and tolerance, problem solving, team working, communication, leadership” (Chaita 2016).

On the other hand, another scholar Dorsey compares employability skills with medicine which one has to gulp in order to survive in the job market. He highlights the vital nature of employability skills by terming them to be unavoidable and thinks that they “are often times the area that will determine failure or success for many in the workplace in personal life as well as individual contractor. Some of the most important people in the world are failing, because though they have mastered the hard skills, they can’t cope with the world that is fuelled by soft skills.” (Dorsey 2004).

In addition to the above stated perspectives on employability skills it has also been defined by Keller, Parker, and Chan as an assorted array of knowledge, skills, and attributes that are relevant for the workplace (Keller et al. 2011). Employability skills include two categories of skills: technical and soft skills (Omar et al. 2012).

However, to inculcate these skills among the students an interactive methodology has been adopted which generates their interest and enable them to gain proficiency in soft skills.

The main objective of the course Business communication is to provide training to the students in both the oral and written communication skills, necessary for various managerial activities such as conducting and participating in interviews, discussing in groups, presenting individually and in teams, speaking in public, giving instructions, conducting meetings, etc. The components included in the course along with the proper interactive delivery in classrooms enable the students to understand and demonstrate the use of proper and advanced writing techniques that today’s technology demands including anticipation and audience reaction. As it is a course offered every second semester, so the methodology, case studies and the assessments vary in order to bring in a fresh perspective every time.

The course has several components such as initial lectures based on providing exposure to different kinds of communication activities in an organization so as to better equip the learners with the nuances associated with the significance of different kinds and modes of communication. The objective of the case studies adopted for the communication module is to create an awareness among the students about the professional working environment and it establishes a base for learning the soft skills.

Case study 1: After giving them theoretical inputs through certain examples, the students are asked to visit different work segments of BITS Pilani Library and come up with all the essential aspects related to interpersonal communication associated with the working of Library. The same case study is evaluated as an assignment where the focus is on the following skills:

In addition to teaching the essentials of communication for managers’ students are encouraged to come up with their own presentation topics and all the topics are further discussed in the class to avoid repetitions. In this exercise, they develop the skills to discriminate between the important and not so important topics and after a lot of deliberation among the team members a final decision about the topic is taken. The learners are also encouraged to participate openly during classroom lectures so as to provide them a friendly ambience and allow free exchange of information on any topic. The different soft skills teaching modules are dealt with separately as discussed in the upcoming sections.

Feedback from the students after every session is considered mandatory which lets the instructor test the knowledge acquired during the entire course. Out of 80 students registered in the course at least 75% rate the course to be successful in inculcating the soft skills among the entire population. On being asked about the components they considered the most important and interesting ones some students rate the components differently but Group discussions and interviews are being rated as the most important skills due to the urgent requirement in their placement process.

However, there are certain differences in terms of the fluency in expression and the language as there are certain students who are not at par with the mainstream engineering students due to their educational background and hence their performance is not as good as the engineering students.

Practice based components and the interactive methodology enables the students to learn better and provide them an opportunity to not only learn through doing but also gets an exposure in understanding the indispensability of the skills which is considered to be quite insignificant during their college years and can be learned later. As the students in BITS Pilani are highly proficient in their language they are also made to learn the difference between language proficiency and the honing of skills required for their future job. Realization of this urgent need of human skills prompts them to work hard and participate not just during classroom sessions but even after lecture hours to discuss the possible strategies to further improve these skills. However, with the changing classroom, teaching scenario, which should be more of practice oriented rather than merely confined to delivering lectures there is a need to continuously update the teaching pedagogy to be more and more interactive and task based.