Improving Effectiveness of Teaching for Enhancing Employability of Engineering Graduates

India is a highly populated nation. The diversity in terms of geography, weather conditions and languages is phenomenal across the country, although, the culture remains the same. It is believed that a large majority of the people in the country belong to middle or low income group. Traditionally the school education in the country is considered to be powerful for training the students in mathematics. As majority of the students are job seekers and need to earn immediately after completing their education, many of them have started joining engineering programs, for their career. Private trusts have been permitted to set up educational institutions in India on no-profit basis and about 90% of the students undertake engineering education in private institutions. The institutes earn their cost through the tuition fees charged to the students, which are approved by the Govt. The students have a choice to join any institute in a State through a single window system. The students join such institutions which can offer jobs immediately on completion of their education. The industry has felt that many engineers have a formal degree but do not satisfy their requirements for employability. There is a need to look at the Teaching-Learning process which can impart adequate technical knowledge to the students to make them employable. The authors have conducted several workshops for teachers of engineering colleges and have identified parameters, in terms of qualities of teachers, which are measurable. A questionnaire has been designed to seek feedback from all the students at regular interval (monthly basis) to carry out such measurements leading to a performance index (PI) of a teacher. Teachers' can take efforts to improve their PI continuously. The managements of the institutes have also agreed to link PI to the financial annual increments. This paper presents results of such measurements at one particular institute.