Even as a kid growing up in a small town I never came across an unemployed graduate. Graduation entitled you to lifetime employment as long as you are willing to show up for work. On the other hand, non-graduates who were vocationally skilled tradesmen - carpenters, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, operators, etc., albeit skilled, struggled to sustain a livelihood.
Today, we see that over 60 per cent of engineering graduates are unemployed, while on the other hand the per capita income of vocational jobs has increased and shot past the starting salaries of engineers in several sectors. Vocational jobs today entitle one to a lifetime of self-employment and in many cases enable a path to even setting up a sustainable enterprise --- a classic case of the rise of the blue-collar versus the white collar.
Take these conventional jobs in the IT sector at an entry-level - IT systems engineer, software engineer, network engineer, network administrator and the likes. Almost every graduate employed in these roles would have gotten custom trained and certified after graduating from a range of engineering streams that will put the variety on display in a retail store to shame.
The massive engineering education capacity covering such diverse streams is not really justified and even economically viable if it just comes down to measuring success on the basis of employment in the IT and some other select sectors. On the other hand in many ignored sectors the lack of availability of truly skilled engineers is gradually increasing. This is pushing India into the hallowed ‘missing middle’ - a state of national employment, characterised by the absence of semi-skilled technical workforce relative to the abundant low-skilled labour and high-skilled managerial workforce.
The race for employment in select sectors as the ultimate barometer of success and as the sine qua non of engineering education has unquestionably blindfolded our social consciousness into neglecting and ignoring the many possibilities and enormous potential created by vocational training and vocational jobs.
Imagine the number of times in our everyday work we would have wanted a quick-fix to any of our Digital/IT systems or a simple, cost-effective implementation of Digital/IT systems that truly fit our specific needs. We choose to wait for the high-heaven MNCs to come fix our problems.
What if we had an army of meaningfully skilled IT engineer tradesmen to service these needs? What if we had put technology in the hands of skilled manpower to solve real-world problems ?
What technology are we talking about ? Democratised, open, simple, affordable, and cost effective. Creative, not complicated technology - technology that enables the creative solving of problems we face every day. Actually the toolkit of an electrician and the technology of a truly skilled IT engineer both fit this definition. What should judge which technology is better? Only the problems solved, the jobs done, the outcomes delivered, the pains relieved, and the gains created.
How do we hope to solve the everyday problems affecting our homes, streets, factories, elders, women, differently-abled, and disadvantaged? Wait for Google or Apple to paint TECHNOLOGY with a giant brush?
Or entrust, enable, and empower engineering students/graduates to become Micro-Innovators. These are people who innovate a cost-effective solution to solve any of these problems by effectively using creative technology to offer a solution that is useful, usable, and technically feasible to become permanently deployed/used by the target user.
With every passing day the expanse of creative technology is widening at a rapid pace, and the possibilities emerging are limitless. IoT, 3D printing, desktop fabrication, industrial automation, robotics, low-volume electronics manufacturing & assembly, computing & data science etc., are creating limitless possibilities and the pace of their progress and democratisation is relentless. From mass manufacturing (a few million jobs) to manufacturing by masses (self-employment and enterprise creation creating tens of millions of jobs), the age of the Micro-Innovator is truly upon us.
What led to the triumph of the Engineer over the Technician? Perhaps at some stage the person and the technology overtook the job, the need, the skills, and the sweat-of-the-brows lost to the click-of-the-mouse!
Or is it the utter lack of combined social consciousness in not adequately, equitably, and meaningfully recognising the progression from self-employed technicians to micro enterprises, and their ultimate success as job creators, wealth distributors, custodians of the society, and as nation builders? And the people of Coimbatore - the quintessential entrepreneurial city built on the pillars of self-employment, inventiveness, and enterprise, more than anyone else can truly relate to this after having witnessed successive generations of several such role-model entrepreneurs.
In the past 30 years when the software and internet revolution changed humanity more than the previous 3,000 years, we missed the opportunity to create IT Micro-Innovators. Do we miss the ongoing IoT revolution, the looming Automation revolution?
Can we set the bar for measuring success in student innovations lower? Not at the level of assessing the potential of their innovative ideas to become break-through products beating global standards or to become highly profitable enterprises. But, instead, evaluate the potential of their ideas to use creative technology to solve real-world problems, even if at a micro-scale. And, more importantly, enable them with the resources, the training so that they bring those ideas to life. Engineering education then becomes experiential, vocational, and endowed with the potential to foster self-employment before catalysing enterprise creation in the longer run.