Engineering is one career stream which we Indians have been obsessed with other than Medicine. Parents and parents of parents and further have apparently worshipped this career stream as if not being an engineer is going to lead to the end of this world. Then there was an influx of IT jobs, which led to parents concentrating on computer engineering stream because it promised lucrative opportunities abroad and were money spinners. This led to a flood of engineering colleges in India, but with the only motive of spinning money and hence the quality of engineering reduced drastically. These colleges took a piggy bank ride on the IT sectors opportunities and churned out engineers to fill their requirements. The quality of education was reduced to an extent that a recent report showed that only 1.4% of the computer engineers could write code that was functionally correct and efficient. This report is a mirror to the present state of engineering education in India and a call to the system experts to work around some solution of it.

One of the main reasons behind this state of engineers is selection of this stream not as a matter of choice but as a matter of pressure from the family and greed for a high paying career path. Students take up engineering, become engineers, start working for multinational companies and then due to the lack of interest and lack of skills start feeling unhappy. As a result the upcoming generation has started picking up streams that interest them primarily and these include design as well as law.

While there is no denying that in general engineering is a stream that is going to be there forever, but its high time that we come of age and work towards creating engineers that are ready for life not just a job or career. It’s high time that we go beyond the theoretical knowledge to making our students future ready engineering with critical thinking and decision making abilities so that they can adapt to any other stream irrespective of the job switch.

Change is the only constant with the world today and innovation is the key to it. So, creating engineers that are future ready can go a long way in bringing a progressive change in the present engineering education ecosystem.