By Alok Mittal & Hitesh Oberoi
The goal of education has progressively evolved—from building a literate society, to building a mastering and innovating society. A society exactly where individuals constantly understand and then apply their mastering to create options to actual-life challenges and generally even develop goods and services that individuals believed had been hitherto not achievable. Relevant expertise against which to benchmark such literacy and mastering have also evolved rapidly—from operating and constructing machines, to driving innovation at breakneck speed. These underlying shifts contact for a transformation of engineering education as we know it.
Current engineering education, in most components of the globe, has been made for hierarchical organisations with effectively-defined roles—this reflects itself in early segregation and specialisation inside disciplines. It also calls for relative separation of engineering and management roles, each and every pursuing its personal tools and tactics for sustenance and innovation. Further, what in hindsight appears like a slower and incremental pace of alter, has permitted lifelong careers exactly where the certain technical talent sets stay relevant more than a extended period of time.
Fundamental modifications to these dynamics are in motion. First, technologies is evolving at a quicker pace than ever. And it is no longer a linear evolution. The concepts of singularity that drive several technological disciplines across computing, biology, power, and so on, are inherently exponential and disruptive in nature. Part of such disruption is driven by digitisation, which has resulted in immense quantity, range and velocity of information obtaining captured at different touchpoints, and the availability of the essential tools to analyse this information. Second, organisations are breaking their hierarchical structures for more agile and cross-functional capabilities. A pipeline-driven organisation with effectively-defined roles exactly where activities flow from one portion of the organisation to yet another in a lockstep manner just is not effectively-positioned to take benefit of these fast modifications.
The fittest organisations of the future will be the most agile and seamless ones. Hence, smaller information-driven teams with interdisciplinary expertise, choice-generating capability and clear accountability of outcomes will drive the organisational structures of tomorrow.
It is in this context of society and altering job roles that engineering education have to reimagine itself. The fast pace of alter indicates that certain expertise learnt in college will get outdated many instances inside our profession-span. Hence the potential to understand continually becomes a core capability. The education method will will need to assure that students create the curiosity to preserve mastering and that they have the potential to apply this know-how in practice. At the identical time, there is an chance for educational institutions to develop a continuous mastering engagement with their students, rather than feel of it as a 3- or 4-year stint.
In the extremely-revolutionary, remedy-oriented globe of tomorrow, firms will will need two types of employees—those who are wonderful at interdisciplinary work not just inside the disciplines of engineering, but also style, social science, management and relevant domains and these who have quite deep specialisation in places such as information science, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. Engineering institutions will have to cultivate these expertise amongst students, and in a sense get started to integrate more with disciplines conventionally linked with liberal arts and management institutions. University structures could provide an best breeding ground for such style and delivery of engineering education.
Another crucial talent set will be the potential of future staff to work in teams. As organisations get nuclear and hierarchies weaken, generating teams carry out will turn out to be more a function of empathy and influence, and significantly less about authority. Strong interpersonal expertise and communication each inside and outdoors one’s teams will turn out to be increasingly crucial. These are places exactly where existing engineering education has played tiny emphasis, and that desires to be corrected.
There are also handful of other dynamics at work in a nation like India. As India grows larger and richer, it will move away from becoming a nation that makes use of technologies created overseas to building its personal IP in every single region. This will call for deeper collaboration involving government, academia and business, one thing which one does not see today. We will also will need to resolve for challenges that nations like India face, rather than just orient our education method to ‘developed world problems’. This will contact for emphasis on domains like agriculture, climate alter, sustainability, overall health and poverty. It also presents an chance for India to leapfrog the globe in these places of investigation and application.
India could aspire to turn out to be a worldwide hub for innovations in electric automobiles, precision medicine, digital overall health, precision agriculture, information-based services, space and defence technologies, and the like. Engineering institutes in India have to get started to tailor their investigation and education agenda towards these places.
Moreover, the financial model in India is extremely shaped by smaller sized organisations and the prospective for get started-up activity. Citizens of tomorrow have to be net job producers and not net job shoppers. Engineering education institutions have to seize this chance and infuse the talent sets relevant to founding and expanding profitable companies—right from buyer understanding, to chance identification and constructing options, and to building sustainable expanding organisations. They will need to graduate from imparting theoretical know-how to building a tinkering mindset amongst students.
The engineering education method in India, today, finds itself in a ideal storm. The possibilities designed by fast technological course of action, altering organisational norms, democratisation of entrepreneurship and India’s rising prominence on the worldwide stage provide a ideal crucible for building a new type of an engineer.
(This is the second post in the series ‘We need a new kind of engineer’)
Mittal is co-founder, Indifi Technology, and Oberoi is promoter, founder & CEO, InfoEdge Ltd. Both are founders & trustees of the upcoming Plaksha University