Only 34% of graduates are employable: Survey

Even as the country would produce over five million graduates next year, only 34% of them would be employable as most of them lack necessary skills required for any role in the industry. The assessment by Wheebox, People’s Strong in collaboration with Confederation of Indian Industry reveals that employers in 2014, will stress on skills rather the qualifications.

The online tests conducted in about 2,200 colleges across 28 states and seven union territories for two months in August and September this year, mainly concentrated on English language, cognitive skills, personality, information technology, general abilities and domain skills — finance, retail, sales and automobile — of students graduating early next year.

Although, the 34% employable included only 11% females, the survey says that female employees are better in quality than their male counterparts.  During the assessment at least 100 employers were contacted in 10 sectors including engineering & core, hospitality, travel, BPO, banking, finance and others.

Wheebox Employability Skills Test (WEST) is endorsed by Confederation of Indian Industry and Association of Indian Universities and claims to be the only Indian assessment company that is the certified member of International Test Commission. This is the first effort in its kind that has brought government, industry, sector skill councils, association and academia on one platform.

Over half of India’s 1.2 billion people are under the age of 30, and some 12 million Indians are expected to join the workforce every year over the next 10 years.  As per the report’s findings, 2014 would not see bullish hiring in any of the sectors. Out of the ten sectors surveyed, majority of the sectors including BFSI, BPO/ITES, manufacturing are not expecting a major change in their hiring numbers. Engineering and core, hospitality and travel, are the only sectors where there will be a significant increase in the hiring numbers.  “Students were not only poor in English language, but the basic domain knowledge in respective fields was also very poor. Lack of confidence and poor problem solving skills was there in most of the students,” founder and CEO of Wheebox, Nirmal Singh told dna.

Preparing for tomorrow
1,00,000 number of students surveyed. Of them 32,000 were girls

2200 number of colleges contacted for the survey

100 number of employers questioned

10 number of sectors covered
Percentage of total employable youth: 34

Percentage of female employable youth: 11

60 days Duration of the survey