Bridging the Gap Getting the Students Industry Date:   Wednesday , November 03, 2010 Forrester in one of its 2007 report mentioned the need for Indian IT industry to be more like value add advisors and innovators and go up the value chain to compete with the upcoming IT work force from different parts of the world. While India engineering centers contribute a lot towards “product and solution development and execution”, our contribution towards “product conceptualization, strategic technology future and thought leadership”, need more impetus. One of the key accelerators that will help propel India Engineering towards Innovation Excellence will be the vast talent pool generated by Tier -2, Tier-3 colleges in India as they will be major players of the future of our IT industry. Touching these students while in college and preparing them for the Industry with a long term vision of going up in the value chain is a challenge. Seeding these students with the right principles of industry perspective technology learning and work ethics will help accelerate the transformation we look for in a few years. Here we articulate the vision for an ideal student coming out of the college, and propose ideas on bridging the gaps. We think it is a social responsibility for all of us to be part of this transformation. Vision We need to strategically profile the ideal student passing out of the college, in terms of Industry requirements. By vision we don’t mean the curriculum or the contents of the individual courses in universities. An ideal student ready for the industry should be able to independently think about the problem areas to come up with solutions and have the right attitude towards technology (both software/hardware) development, innovation and team work. He should have the following key attributes: 1. Drive and creativity in IT problem solving – Strong in fundamentals, Programming skills, Algorithms. 2. Real Life Technology Exposure – Good exposure to latest open source technologies and any other major technologies. Should have gone through at least one complete project life cycle with real life technologies. 3. Self Learning Abilities – With the information deluge in the internet era, assimilation of the right information on demand to produce right results. 4. Courage to delve into the unknown – Ability to move to new technology areas and learn without expensive training or hand holding. 5. Pro-active thinking – More inquisitive and questioning in nature to get deeper understanding of the problem at hand and analyze quality tradeoffs in algorithms and design with propensity towards innovation. 6. Work ethics and Soft skills –Integrity, commitment, hard work and dedication, Good Communication skills, email etiquette. 7. Awareness – In general being aware of the IT industry trends, and the happenings in the industry. Bridging the Gaps How do we bridge the gaps between the Ideal student described above and the student passing out of the college? There are several factors that contribute to the widening of the gaps and adopting pro-active measures in the right areas, will help narrow the gap and help seed the right principles in the students. Emphasize Self-Learning and Pro-active Thinking Informational teaching gives the students a bunch of information on a syllabus and later subject them to well defined pattern of questions to which they respond reactively. The latter we term as reactive thinking. This kind of exposure for 3-4 years tends to restrict their thinking and creates lots of gravity for the students to come out of it. Real life problems and projects quickly tend to take most of the students out of the comfort zone and again they rely on training or information to solve those situations. Students tend to complement the gaps with private training on specific technologies but quickly realize the need to learn some other technology and so on. This cannot scale in industry where quick on-demand learning and parallel learning is a key to success. A conscious focus on the ability of the students to learn by themselves i.e., Self-Learning with guidance and Pro-active thinking instead of reactive thinking is required. The nature of the delivery of the course syllabus needs some adjustment, and below we give a framework of principles under which if we operate, the students perform better from our experience. Subjecting the students to more patterns based on these principles will transform them to be industry ready. Accountability of the Final Year Projects including Work Ethics and Soft Skills More emphasis is required on the nature and execution of the final year project. It should go through the entire project life cycle touching open source technologies, industry standard APIs, and a framework needs to be put in place to evaluate the project along these lines. Original coding work on the project should be evaluated based on the no. of lines of effective code, innovative ideas, and the actual result produced. Industry people should get involved actively in these projects and they should contribute to the final evaluation as well. Work Ethics and Soft skills evaluation should be integrated with this project delivery - on Integrity, hard work, commitment, dedication, team work, communication, email etiquette and presentation. Students should go through the entire Project life cycle concepts – “explore, analyze, prototype, design, implement and integrate “during the execution of the project. Students should be encouraged to do original projects and contribute to open source communities that can lead to more young entrepreneurs. We have had experiences of students buying “ready-made projects” from outside and such practices should be strongly discouraged by the college and NASSCOM should take special effort to backlist IT companies who provide such ready-made projects to the students. This just reduces the quality significantly. Effective Jobs and Interviews The demand-supply nature of the IT industry causes intense competition among the companies to grab the fresh students at the earliest. This has resulted in job offers to the students during pre-final year (3rd year) or early final year (7th semester, 4th yr). These job offers tend to cause a sense of relaxation among the students with only getting pass marks until they pass out, and a significant amount of learning is compromised during this period. NASSCOM should give strong guidance to the Indian companies not to give out job offers prior to final semester. Job Interviews should focus on both fundamentals and more importantly on the originality and quality of the project work done by the student. Mandatory Industry-University Connection We should pro-actively enable the Industry-University Connection with some measurable results imposed by NASSCOM on the industry. We should form an Industry wide special interest group with investments from individual companies in the form of people who will go and teach students. Colleges should have a mandatory one course in each semester taught by Industry people especially on programming languages and fundamentals. Similarly projects should be guided by one industry guide with responsibility to evaluate the student’s performance on project technicals and soft skills. While avenues (such as internship) exist today to make this happen, lack of a framework of accountability and metrics has resulted in dilution. Efforts should be taken to have the industry reach for Tier-2 and Tier-3 colleges. Key Principles – The Pillars We believe in the following three key principles along with the above ideas to transform the student to an IT professional. (a) Experiential Learning – where the students should be exposed to different real life technologies, experience and understand the nuances and apply them to solve real problems. (b) Rapid Fail-Fast Convergence Model – Students should be encouraged to develop real life code and programs, where they should constantly go through the cycle of Develop -> Fail -> Adjust -> Learn -> Converge. By failing often, the students learn fast, and converge to a learning knowledge. (c) Big Picture Connection and Cognition – Students should know the individual pieces of the technology puzzle how they fit in the big picture (Technology Principles). Students should know to connect the individual pieces of the puzzle to form patterns (Design Patterns). Students should know to think long term based on the quality tradeoffs to decide on a direction of the technology project (Strategic Vision). We have successfully applied the three principles above in helping to transform the students to an Industry Ready Computer Professional. We presented a holistic view of bridging the gaps in getting a student industry ready that will help us set forth a bright future for the students to become IT innovators of our country tomorrow. The Author is Founder, Datsi