The document discusses the employability crisis facing engineering graduates in India, highlighting that only 4-7% are fit for core industry jobs. In response, the Radel Group has launched the Drona School of Engineering Practice to provide hands-on training and mentorship in key fields like electronics and aerospace, preparing graduates to meet industry demands. The 'Campus2Career' program offers a six-month course that equips students with essential technical and soft skills, ensuring they are job-ready from day one.

1. Job-Ready From Day One
G Raj Narayan
www.grajnarayan.com
twitter.com/grajnarayan

2. About 1.5 million engineers graduated from more than 3,500
engineering colleges across India in 2014, but how many of
them are really employable in the core industries?
One of the studies (Aspiring Minds, Report 2014) says that
only a shocking four to seven per cent of them are actually
fit for jobs in the core engineering sectors. An earlier study
by the World Bank (2010) showed that employers were not
satisfied with the fresh engineering graduates they recruited.
Graduates seemed to lack higher order thinking skills:
analysing, evaluating and creating.
It is this gap between the existing education system and the
actual industry requirement that needs to be met. The
sunrise industries of aerospace, defence and electronics
need thousands of skilled engineers for design as well as
manufacture. Today, while we find many training institutes
for software, even computer hardware and networking,
there are very few training schools for engineers in core
disciplines, especially electronics and aerospace engineering
design, and none that include robust processes,
documentation and project management.
Currently, the Radel Group has embarked on a novel
initiative for the engineering fraternity aimed at mentoring
and training them in a real industrial environment on live
projects to make them industry-ready. The Drona School of
Engineering Practice is a timely and unique initiative that
focuses on creating skilled engineers, especially for the
electronics, aerospace and defence sectors.

3. There are several areas where the “Apprenternship”
programme offered by Drona differs from other training
programmes. The most important one is the mentorship
provided by veterans of industry and personal guidance from
one of the most respected inventors of India. Another key
differentiator is the hands-on work experience and exposure
to live projects. The student gets an insight into the design and
development cycle of defence and aerospace systems that
meet global industry standards of performance, reliability and
efficiency. The graduate is trained in systematic quality analysis
and documentation processes that are essential for a
manufacturing industry, especially in the A&D sector.
The “Apprentern” is provided soft-skills training and a working
knowledge of how an industry operates. A fresh engineering
graduate who opts for the Drona programme at Radel goes
through a complete transformation of his/her thought process,
through which critical, analytical and innovative skills blossom.

4. Training is provided in written and oral communication
skills, business etiquette and time management. The
engineer emerges at the end of the course as a confident
and competent young and dynamic professional, with
enhanced communication skills — in effect, industry-ready.
Every industrialist is aware of the time, cost and effort of
training fresh engineers. In most organisations, the first few
months are spent in training new recruits, with literally no
output. The Drona programme takes on the initial training
effort of the industry and provides the employer with a
trained engineer, ready for the job, so that the employer
gets productivity from the new engineer right from day one.
The intensive six-month holistic programme,
“Campus2Career”, offers several skilling programmes in
embedded systems, avionics, electronics design and related
domains comprising all aspects that are required to make a
fresh engineer job-ready. The aspiring trainee can select
from a variety of subject modules that have combinations of
embedded software, embedded electronics design,
avionics, mechanical Cad and PCB designs, technical
documentation and project management, apart from a
basic introduction to various facets of industry (production,
planning, admin, HR, etc) and, importantly, soft skills such
as verbal and written communication, time management
and business etiquette.
The first session of Drona’s “Campus2Career” starts from 1
July 2015.