Job-seekers: 'Get hands on experience!'

'Young talent should not run after procuring certificates, but try and get hands on experience which will help them to be job ready.'
'Learning for the sake of learning does not make sense when it comes to securing a job.'

Do you know which state in India has most job-ready talent?

Not Maharashtra. Not Delhi, Karnataka or Kerala either.

According to a latest survey, Nagaland houses the most tech job-ready talent, while technology hub Karnataka has ranked among below-average performers.

IP-driven incubation labs BridgeLabz conducted a survey between May and October 2020 to find how job-ready India's tech graduates are.

The survey covering 37,000 engineering graduates found that candidates in Nagaland scored 122 per cent compared to the average score, followed by Uttarakhand (117 per cent), Meghalaya (112 per cent), Haryana (110 per cent), and Punjab (109 per cent).

"Learning for the sake of learning does not make sense when it comes to securing a job," Narayan Mahadevan, left below, founder and CEO, Bridgelabz, tells Divya Nair/Rediff.com.

As per your job-readiness survey, youth in Nagaland fared better than IT-dominated states like Karnataka in terms of job-readiness. What reasons do you attribute to this development?

While Nagaland talent did score better -- it could as well have been another state.

The important thing that this points out though is that best talent is not usually found in the Tier 1 cities as hiring companies think!

Good talent is sprinkled everywhere. Also the density of engineering colleges in a state leads to a lot more competition and less quality education.

What are some of the other interesting findings from the report?

Interestingly, women engineers perform significantly better than men.

Also the number of states in which women outperform men is higher than for the converse -- which means the overall quality of women talent far exceeds that of men.

In fact, women of 18 states scored above 100% as against the men where the 100% is average score.

What are the factors/skills that highlight job readiness in young professionals?

Job readiness simply put is the level of productivity the student or young professional is able to show when he or she starts on his job.

Every organisation has a very different understanding of what job readiness means and can vary by degrees.

In our experience for engineers, basic coding and tech competency based on foundational skills design understanding and full stack development it is required for engineers in addition to being a confident communicator.

What are some of the skills, qualifications that are no longer relevant?

Today learning for the sake of learning does not make sense when it comes to securing a job.

Hence, just certification courses, be it on any topic, don't make the cut.

Young talent should not run after procuring certificates, but try and get hands on experience which will help them to be job ready.

The skills that will dominate hiring in India in the next 5-10 years

The job market is eternal. Going by the latest trend, technology-driven careers are becoming more and more popular as the world has gone digital.

Irrespective of what field one chooses, there are always certain skills that increase their likelihood of success.

Skills like creative thinking, the art of persuasion, will continue to dominate in the next 5-10 years.

Considering the year 2020, emotional intelligence, skill enhancement, virtual collaboration and adaptability along with risk or crisis management are the few skills that will rule in the coming few years.

The sectors likely to hire more Indian professionals in the next 10 years.

Increasingly, non-digital sectors are adopting technology slowly and steadily. This means most organisations in every sector will in the future require increasingly more dynamic tech talent.

So our bet would be on the traditionally non digital sectors requiring tech talent in 5-10 yrs.

Should kids as young as 5-6 years learn coding?

Learning to code is like any other learning as long as it is driven by a personal passion to learn and is relevant for the age group.

Young kids are able to pick things up quickly and so as long as it is not putting unnecessary burden on their fragile minds -- it should be good.

So learning to code is good. It is the methodology that matters.

Besides coding and programming, what are some of the other skills, courses parents and teachers can introduce kids to?

I think teaching kids to be mindful of themselves is very important.

Lockdown and being stuck at home is as stressful to them as it is to adults. It could be through meditation or just plain simple playing relevant games - should help them .

What should youngsters do to ensure they have a job at the end of their course?

Get hands on experience! Don't run after just certificates if the course is about just watching a few online videos.

Any tips to ace online interviews?

Everything that applies to offline interviews applies to online as well.

However in addition being a good communicator becomes even more important.

Being confident and projecting it on a virtual interaction is a skill youngsters have to pick up.