As per an Independent survey conducted by Aspiring Minds, an online employment assessment platform revealed that less than 20% engineers are employable for Software Engineer Jobs. This survey was conducted on Engineering & MCA Final year students of all over India and included a significantly large number of graduates. Also it was noted that "Over the last 4 years there has been no significant change in this number"

It seems that the major factors responsible for such drastic results are:

1. Lack of updated syllabus
2. Lack of domain knowledge
3. The gap between teaching and learning pedagogy
4. Also other non-technical factors such as lack of English communication and low analytical and quantitative skills.

Source: AMCAT

Colleges need to take many steps to reduce this employability gap. However, one of the very easy and effective solution in this direction would be to actively collaborate with good startups and companies to arrange for good industrial training exposure for students. This allows the students to work with the industry directly and learn a great deal.

However, to make industrial training experience effective, colleges need to guide and groom the students in correct direction. The prime objective of industrial training should be "learn" and not focus too much on "earn". At times colleges promote and encourage students to get trained in companies that are offering highest stipends. That strategy may work for colleges in the short term as they will get the numbers to show off, but chances are the students will be working on some mundane task like data entry, and will not learn anything new. Colleges need to remember "There is no free lunch".

So while allowing students to choose a company for their industrial training, if possible, collage staff should interact with the company staff to inquire about what kind of work the students will be doing. A lot of times instead of putting in effort, students also buy projects reports and submit the same in college.

So with respect to industrial training colleges should:

1. Short list and recommend some good companies / start ups for training.
2. Promote students to focus more on learning and guide them to consider this as part of their studies instead of treating is as an opportunity to have some more fun.
3. Ensure students behave in professional manner when the under go industrial training.
4. Try to interact with company staff to find out what the students will work on and get direct feedback on students.
5. Ensure that the project report students are submitting are actually prepared by them.
6. During final viva not only focus on project reports but also inquire about development processes followed in the company etc.