Aspiring Minds, a Gurgaon-based company that assesses students' employability, surveyed 55,000 of them last year and found that not even 3% were ready to be taken on by IT firms without extra training.
But if the brothers exemplify the engineering gap, the firm they started together in 2007, Aspiring Minds, is busy debunking it.According to the company, only 4.2% of India's engineers are fit to work in a software product firm, and just 17.8% are employable by an IT services company, even with up to six months' training.
Aspiring Minds earns enough of a return to allow it to reinvest in the business, and to attract outside investors, so that it can scale quickly.
Importantly, Aspiring Minds acts as a social multiplier by targeting everyone from twenty-somethings upwards, who would otherwise become disenfranchised and alienated.
That was the seed for Aspiring Minds, founded by two students I had the good fortune to meet, an engineer from MIT and one from IIT.
But Aspiring Minds keeps costs down by running its test in the computer labs of the colleges themselves, rather than on dedicated infrastructure.
Aspiring Minds tested people already employed by such companies, looking for correlations between the test results of past recruits and their success on the job, as judged by managers.The company is not the first to bring standardised testing to India.
Around a third of Indian graduates will remain unemployed, despite employers bemoaning a lack of skilled recruits.Varun Aggarwal of Aspiring Minds, a company that surveys student capabilities, estimates that if university exams were run properly, 70% of students would fail.
So far, Aspiring Minds seems to have done just fine, getting paid by candidates who take the tests and corporates who hire successfully from tested candidates; in the future, perhaps other entities will also pay for the matching process.
As a result, hundreds of large and mid-size employers only allow students to apply for a position once they have taken a new standardized assessment: the AMCAT, an employment assessment from global credentialing leader Aspiring Minds.
Here, LinkedIn has partnered with HackerRank, as well as Aspiring Minds, Co-cubes and Wheebox, to develop an online test for users to show off their skills and interests, which are then matched up with a number of jobs being advertised on the site.
