Testing India's graduates

The engineering gap

India’s tech workers are not as good as the country hopes and America fears

Jan 28th 2010 | DELHI | From The Economist print edition

EACH year India produces about twice as many engineering and computing geeks as America, counting those with bachelor’s degrees or a Master’s in Computer Applications, a conversion course. This “engineering gap” is a source of pride in India and consternation in America, which fears the cutting and pasting of high-tech jobs from West to East.

Himanshu and Varun Aggarwal are two of India’s formidable techies. They hold degrees from top institutions in Delhi and Massachusetts. But if the brothers exemplify the engineering gap, the firm they started together in 2007, Aspiring Minds, is busy debunking it.

According to the company, only 4.2% of India’s engineers are fit to work in a software product firm, and just 17.8% are employable by an IT services company, even with up to six months’ training. A larger share could cope in business-process outsourcing (call centres and the like). These findings are even gloomier than the 25% figure for employability that has been bandied about since 2005, when McKinsey released the results of a survey of international companies.

Aspiring Minds has subjected thousands of engineering and computer-science students to a standardised test, akin to the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) required by American universities. The test gauges students’ analytical, verbal and quantitative skill, as well as features of their personalities. Called the AMCAT, it draws on theories Varun studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which helps him assess the difficulty of questions. But how many questions must a student answer correctly to be considered “employable” by an IT firm? Aspiring Minds tested people already employed by such companies, looking for correlations between the test results of past recruits and their success on the job, as judged by managers.

The company is not the first to bring standardised testing to India. Prometric, which administers the GRE, has several test sites around the country. But Aspiring Minds keeps costs down by running its test in the computer labs of the colleges themselves, rather than on dedicated infrastructure. The test is designed to withstand power cuts (it picks up where it left off when electricity returns) and the viruses that fester on public computers in India.

Because they recruit so many people, India’s big IT firms cannot sift every job candidate carefully. They instead confine their search to the top colleges, using campus as a proxy for quality. The AMCAT confirms that the percentage of good recruits for IT services firms drops by about half outside the top 100 colleges. But Varun points out that this wider pool of students is about ten times larger. He reckons that over 80% of employable students are outside the top 100 campuses, where potential employers do not look for them.

Varun hopes that the AMCAT will give these invisible students a cheap and effective way to catch employers’ attention. India will need to overhaul many of its colleges if it is to make more of their graduates employable. In the meantime, the country’s IT firms cannot afford to overlook the students who already are.

Do you have a roadmap to your goals in life? Do you have a Personal Action Plan?

Most successful people in the world confess that they reached the pinnacle of success based on roadmaps they made to get to their goals. Once they set goals for themselves , they then made their Personal Action Plans (PAPs) to achieve them. They openly attribute their success in life to writing down their goals and reviewing them often. Most successful people have clearly defined goals; athletes, business people, military generals, actors, authors, teachers, the list is long.

Setting your goals is the first step to moving towards success. Unfortunately many people go through life without any clear goals and live out their lives on a day to day basis. They make choices without any long term planning and are indifferent to the outcomes. They remind me of players on a football ground who have a ball but no goal post. So all they do is kick the ball around without scoring!

Do you also want to be like such a player or would you prefer to be a Pele or a Ronaldino? I am sure of what your answer would be, but are you prepared to take the required steps to work on your Personal Action Plans as the first step of the ladder to success?

As with all roadmaps, there could be some detours, about-turns or even blockages. But with persistence, modification and lateral thinking you should be able to reach the mapped destination. You will also have to tweak it often as there are so many possibilities and variables.

Writing your goals down has the added benefit of making you more dedicated to achieving them. That dedication will propel you towards success in areas that YOU want. You have to take charge and it is very much possible.

Creating a personal action plan is not difficult at all. It takes a little time, thought and planning. Let us now look at some of the necessary steps to making your PAP:

i. Identify your goals- both personal and professional. The goals can be anything from losing weight to acing your scores in your exams or being more regular in your attendance of classes. Your destination will be personal and important to you.

ii. Chart the routes on your roadmap. It is important to plan a direct route from beginning to end. Make detours if stalled but do not intentionally build detours into your PAP. For example, if the goal is to lose weight, do not build in a detour if you have to attend your sister’s marriage ceremonies and therefore eat indiscriminately! Stick to your diet.

iii. Plan every step to attain your goals and keep track. If the goal is to lose weight, the obvious steps to reaching the PAP destination will be to exercise, control food intake and drink more water. PAPs need more than the general steps to be successful. The steps have to be quantified. For example: To state that I must exercise for 30 minutes 5 times a week would be better than simply stating I have to exercise. Drinking 8 to 10 glasses of water everyday would be more detailed than just drinking more water. Track your progress with a regular check of your follow up actions.

iv. Modify the personal action plan as necessary. This is bound to happen but the very fact that you are conscious of it will have you keep it in control. For example, your goal of regular 30 minute walk in the park can hit a detour if it is raining hard. So instead of a walk you might have to do something indoors. So you are still headed in the right direction on the road but have had to take a temporary side road to reach the goal.

v. Review the action plan. Regular review is a must so that you can adjust your PAP accordingly.

vi. View your PAP as a self empowering tool. Do not lose heart if there are detours or blockades. Just be flexible, think smart and carry on. As Thomas Edison has said "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." A PAP will help you monitor that.

A Sample PAP:

My Personal Action Plan

My long term goal	Short/ medium term goals to achieve long term goal	Actions required	Constraints	Who or what can help me	Target date for action
1. To acquire high level of English skills	Improve my scores in English exams, tests and assignments	To read books, magazines, newspapers in English. Listen to English news . Watch English movies Speak in English Overcome my shyness, hesitation	Lack of time as I have to also work hard on my other subjects. Cannot afford private tutions	My English teachers, classmates and friends who are good in English	End of the academic year End of formal study in college
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