A RESEARCH study by a French organisation concluded that around 70 per cent of the weightage for jobs in the job market is given to effective communication skills (both written and spoken) as well as effective body language. Let’s take our engineering university education and its product, i.e. the graduates, into perspective and analyse them with respect to the afore-mentioned yardstick.

What we come across in most of the cases is shambolic to say the least. Having been in the academia for the last 27 years, I would not be hesitant to sum up the take-away status of our graduates — ill-trained graduates with almost non-existent communication skills. From the get-go to the end, the taught in most of the universities is kept in the darkness all along when it comes to honing the skill-set that is required by the job market. Instead, they are kept busy all-year round in one exam or the other (26 exams a year), which the students have to deal with after every two weeks in one calendar year.

This suggests that the never-ending pressure of the given number of exams is such that the students can’t even think of having a good handle on the knowledge of subject; rather, their only concern is to be successful in printing the notes out verbatim from the paper on to the mind and then back on to the answer script.

It would be interesting to determine how much weightage this mere printing-out exercise in the name of higher education can afford to the students from the viewpoint of the job market. To off-set this grim situation, it is time the teachers in the higher seats of learning played their due but pivotal role in moulding the taught as per the needs and requirements of the job market.

An industry or its production unit is responsible for its products having poor-quality characteristics and the same applies to teachers, who have to update themselves in every aspect pertaining to overall shape-up of their students before they are shipped out to the job market.

Dr Abdul Rehman Memon

Jamshoro

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2019