95% of engineers in India are not fit for IT jobs; only 1% can write correct codes

If the Aspiring Minds survey is to be believed, 95% of engineers in India are not fit for software development jobs.

The survey stated there is acute shortage of talent in the Information Technology (IT) sector and only 4.77% candidates can write correct logic for a programme. Writing correct code is the minimum requirement for a software engineer.

Over 36,000 engineering students form IT related branches of over 500 colleges took Automata -- a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skills -- and over 2/3 could not even write code that compiles.

The study further noted that while more than 60% candidates cannot even write code that compiles, only 1.4% can write functionally correct and efficient code.

"Lack of programming skills is adversely impacting the IT and data science ecosystem in India. The world is moving towards introducing programming to three-year-old! India needs to catch up," Aspiring Minds CTO and Co-Founder Varun Aggarwal said.

The employability gap can be attributed to rote learning based approaches rather than actually writing programmes on a computer for different problems. Also, there is a dearth of good teachers for programming, since most good programmers get jobs in industry at good salaries, the study stated.