About a month back, my partner Maaz Jukaku wrote a LinkedIn post about we from Emertxe rolling out 1000 free internships targeting engineering students. Deccan Herald’s education section dated August 29th 2021, published an article about this initiative. We have received amazing response from the entire academia and students. We started our first official cohort in July, where we offered 125 free internships to engineering students across India and abroad. The feedback was absolutely mind-blowing, hence, we took further steps in August towards our 1000 internships plan. The response was even better what with over 3000+ aspirants in their pre-final year applied from across the country. After the screening process, we rolled-out 550 internships, still having 100 of them in the waitlisting state. Adding up, we have already crossed the 750 mark in the second month itself, which is really exciting. Such positive response is very encouraging.
The entire EdTech ecosystem is bustling. Many are still curious to know what this free internship is all about. We even got questions like how can you offer something for free? As we all know in India, the word free always comes with a catch. In this post, let me share some perspectives of why we started this program and what our future plans about internships.
Internships Are in a Super Diluted State
Over the years, we have been working to address the industry-academia gap. We have done many technical workshops, offered guest lectures, driven faculty development programs, mentored Hackahons, sponsored tech fest etc. However, most of these activities ended up as a tactical short term activity. We didn’t have a meaningful way to engage college students on a long term basis, that would result in bridging the gap. In the meantime, AICTE brought in the norm of mandatory one-month internship for pre-final year students. The idea of internships is to provide them with practical exposure and prepare them for the future.
The concept of internship is not new for top engineering colleges like IITs and NITs. Students from these colleges easily get internships with a healthy stipend. As these students already have hands-on skills obtained by different channels like online courses, hackathon participation, peer-to-peer learning etc. There already exists a well established skilling and self-learning culture in such top engineering colleges. Hiring them as interns creates value for companies, as students will be able to take up some low hanging task in a live project and give a decent output. In fact, during my corporate stint with HP, I have personally worked and mentored many such college interns. Added to that, internships also act as a channel to attract top talent and convert them as employees by making a pre placement offer.
The internship situation is very different between tier-1 vs tier-2 and tier-3 engineering colleges. Mushrooming internship centres are killing the original purpose of introducing internships.
However, the internship situation is very different when you come to tier-2 and tier-3 engineering colleges. The skill levels of students from these colleges are way lower than that of tier-1 colleges. Companies may not be able to offer them internships as there will be significant effort required to improve their skill levels, which is not possible in one month. On the other hand, colleges expect students to complete the internship and submit certificate of completion as it carries some grade. Pushed from both ends, students from tier-2 and tier-3 colleges end up scouting for internship centres. Typically, these centres are non-credible ones who charge students to provide them certificates. There is absolutely no value created in this process where students get their certificate just to fulfil college formalities. The purpose of introducing internships gets defeated because of this. It is taking the route of paid project centres, where students get their final year projects purchased, instead doing it by themselves. Again this is due to back of skills and mentoring. This creates a chicken or egg problem between aspirations vs skills, as shown in the picture below.
We wanted to to make a positive impact in this internship ecosystem by bringing in a change. In the past year students got comfortable with online learning which has been a game changer for us. Hence, we took the initiative of offering this internship at scale by leveraging our online learning platform. Keeping the limitations of a tier-2 and tier-3 college students, we designed our internship program as a combination of skill building + project based learning by taking a five phased approach, refer to the picture below. We have also topped it up with elements like resume building and interview prep in order to open career possibilities post internship. To keep the focus, we restricted our internships to students from CSE / ECE / EEE branches only.
By the end of the internship, students were be able to achieve both skill building and project building. They were able to see something working in front of their eyes and given tips to how to represent in their resumes as well. Here is an example of what one of our internship student has built, we have many such videos on YouTube. Needless to say, this was super exciting for them, as they have not experienced anything closer to this. The list of testimonials and appreciations continue to flow from both students and professors.
Why Do It Now?
Personally, I feel this is the right time to execute such things at scale. The Indian talent ecosystem is in the cusp of a major transformation driven by three factors.
1. Remote working is here to stay, so as offshoring: The COVID pandemic has made the concept of work from home as a norm. This also means organizations are comfortable in having the work done irrespective of the geography. Over the last few months, we could clearly see more work is moving to India in both service companies and R&D offshore centres. As per my interactions with service company entrepreneurs, India is still 50%-60% cheaper compared to the US when it comes to software development.
2. Indian Unicorns: The Indian startup ecosystem is bustling with a lot of venture capital funds flowing in. Every other day, we hear the news of a company getting funded or becoming a unicorn by getting 1B USD+ valuation. This has opened up flood gates of jobs where hiring skilled engineers remain a challenge for all the companies across the board.
3. The EV transformation: There are new and emerging areas like electric vehicles where India can be a game changer going forward. Indian auto majors like Mahindra,Bajaj, TVS are transforming themselves from a mechanical company to an electric vehicle company. Added to that, new and emerging players like OLA Electric are joining the bandwagon. Take a look into the video by Bhavish Aggarwal (CEO of Ola) where he talks about his ambitious plan of designing and manufacturing EVs from India. To build such vehicles of the future, it requires a multidisciplinary skills from engineers.
The above-mentioned trends are already driving a phenomenal growth in engineering jobs. Demand is exceeding the supply, which is resulting in a talent war. On the supply side, the situation is not so encouraging. A good number of the engineering colleges are facing existential crisis as they cannot scale up themselves due to issues related to lack of hands-on training, outdated teaching staff and administrative bureaucracy. As per the first-hand information received from my close network, I understand good number of engineering colleges are in the verge of shutting themselves down or severely ramping down their operations due to lesser number of admissions. Due to the pandemic, the teaching quality has further gone south as the college faculty were not prepared to deliver online classes. Most of the engineering graduates I have interacted has mentioned that the online classes offered by their college is not at all effective, in fact they found it to be very boring and not at all engaging. It’s very essential for engineering colleges to adapt EdTech and collaborate with external ecosystem to deliver quality education at scale. By seeing challenges on the hiring side and in the academia, we strongly believe this is the right time to scale our internship programs.
Most of the engineering graduates I have interacted has mentioned that the online classes offered by their college is not at all effective, in fact they found it to be very boring and not at all engaging.
What Lies Ahead?
For us in Emertxe it’s high time to scale our education programs using technology. In a matter of month, we are able to witness 5x jump in our internship takers. Looking back, our original plan of offering 1000 internships looks too small as we have already rolled out 750 internships. Going forward, here is our plan for engineering college students.
1. Launch at least two similar internship programs. The first one would be in the form of Internet Of Things (IoT) internship and another one being Full Stack Web Development internship. With both these offerings, we will be able to cater all the branches of Engineering. We are in the early stage of planning, will share more details as things unfold.
2. Use our technology platform and integrate our job oriented Embedded & IoT programs during the college itself. Deemed universities and autonomous colleges have got more flexibility to allow time and resources for our programs. With this approach, we look forward to contribute and solve the existential crisis faced by engineering colleges by becoming a skilling partner.
More exciting days ahead for Emertxe and EdTech overall, stay tuned for more updates.
Excellent initiative for job opportunities.
Thank you for your continued encouragement Sir.