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Do Employability Skills Matter in Placement: An Exploratory Study of Private Engineering Institutions and IT Firms in Delhi NCR

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Abstract

Employability of youth in India has emerged as a major concern in recent years. Generally, it is as for uneducated or unskilled, but the situation is quite alarming even for educated youth as the skills provided by the institutions may not be at par with the industry’s requirement. With this background, the study discusses the outcome of the preliminary research into the employability skills that private engineering institutions try to instill during their graduate course and the employability skills that software/IT companies consider when they undertake fresh recruitment. This paper aims to find the gap between industry’s expectation and the availability which results in partial placements of engineering graduates and to ascertain the relationship between the employability skills and placement of engineering graduates. In particular, the set of employability skills considered for the study was derived from the literature review and pilot study. The data are derived from a survey carried out of 98 private engineering institutions in Delhi NCR and 20 IT/software companies, and the data were analysed using regression analysis and ANOVA. Both institutions and employers were found to focus on employability skills for the best returns. However, there is mismatch in consideration of the employability skills. There are certain skills on which companies lay more attention than the engineering institutions. The findings will be helpful for the engineering institutions and the regulatory bodies in revamping the curriculum.

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The paper is a part of research conducted for Post doctoral fellowship from Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR)

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  1. ICSSR Post Doctoral Fellow Department of Humanities, Delhi Technological University, New Delhi, India

    Antra Singh

  2. Professor in Economics Department of Humanities, Delhi Technological University, New Delhi, India

    Seema Singh

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  1. Antra Singh
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Singh, A., Singh, S. Do Employability Skills Matter in Placement: An Exploratory Study of Private Engineering Institutions and IT Firms in Delhi NCR. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 64, 1093–1113 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-021-00341-x

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