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ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal, ISSN NO. 2456-1037

Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in/index.php/AJEEE

Vol. 07, Special Issue 04, (IC-SSIALPI-2022) August 2022 IMPACT FACTOR: 7.98 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL)

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DELINEATE ACADEMIA-INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIP FOR EXEMPLARY OPPORTUNITIES

FOR EDUCATIONIST, RESEARCHERS AND TO GRADUATES: A MORE TO SKILLED WORKFORCE

Aakanksha Yadav

Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, Sant Hirdaram Girls College, Bhopal Abstract - The industry-Academic Collaboration tends to enhance the skilled workforce either in Education or Industry, because when Practicability combines with traditional way of Teaching-Learning prospect, the main aim in bridging the gap between outsourcing and Academic institution by developing Skill-full Model.

As an Educationist and researcher, it is way more important that we inculcate the Scientific Temper among the students or learners. This Review study talks about Practicability learning Modules and ways out.

Keywords: Industry-Academia Collaboration, Skilled workforce, Practicability, Education, teaching-Learning.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Government, Industry and Academia are three different worlds. All three have different purposes and approaches. However, the rapid change across the world has compelled them to function in a synchronise way with each other. India could potentially emerge as a global supplier of skilled manpower.However, despite these encouraging statistics, a major segment of Indian graduates remains unemployable according to the above report.

Unemployment is indeed a grave problem in India as it has direct repercussions on country’s economy and on social conditions.

Higher educational institutions across the country are training millions of youngsters annually but the corporate often complain about lack of necessary skills among them required for a job. But, Sometimes in effective implementation of policies and lack of initiativesfor a higher education ecosystem lowers down the standards.

One of the approaches to tackle the problem of lacking skill and job readiness among youth is bridging the gap between Government, industry and academia.

To deliver the quality higher education for knowledge generation, technology development, technology transfer, skill development, employability generation and entrepreneurship, transparent industry-academia collaboration with Government intervention in India is absolutely essential on the pattern of the developed countries of the world.

As we are at the threshold of Industrial Revolution 4.0, it is important to prepare people for the jobs of future by founding ways how Government, industry and academia can come together to bridge this gap:

2 CATAPULTS IN BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN HEI’S AND INDUSTRY 1. Build student motivation:

Be it any skill, motivating students plays a very important role. Thanks to our social structure, it is not necessary that all engineering graduates must inculcate analytical and problem-solving skills that makes them a great engineer. As every person is unique their strengths lie in different area. Good number of them today are opting for engineering because of compulsion, which automatically brings down their motivation. On the positive note, every person will have talent in them. As the saying goes fish can’t be judged with its ability to fly.

Graduates should be given opportunities where they discover their strengths. It can be done by making students work on something out-of-the-box and providing them with strong encouragement. The out-of-the-box activity can be anything – organizing college fests, participating in hackathons, making them work with NGOs, providing opportunity to explore their creative side with activities like painting etc. While most of the colleges have clubs to do these activities, it can be used as a mechanism to identify what an individual is really good at. By providing more responsibilities in that direction will automatically increase their motivation and gain confidence to try out something new.

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ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal, ISSN NO. 2456-1037

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On the other hand, students should never be demotivated as we never know what each one will turn out to be. Demotivating just kills the creativity and the confidence of the students. Indian education system is all about how much do we remember and eventually marks those matters. By making students participate in diverse set of activities which can lift them up and increase their motivation.

2. Build a balanced syllabus:

HEI’s Curriculum is one of the highly debated topics these days. Most of them say syllabus should be scrapped and completely made with latest topic. While we can have a long debate on this topic, we recommend to have a balanced approach. For example, Undergraduate subjects can be categorized into foundational subjects (ex: Languages, Communication Skill enhancing courses, Physical education) and advanced subjects (ex: Subject from Allied Sciences). Advanced topics can’t be built without giving enough focus on foundations. Also, foundational learning needs to be made as hands-on with 70% – 30% focus on practical vs. theoretical.

Once students build strong fundamentals, they can be provided opportunity to learn advanced topics. In order to learn latest technologies, other mode of learning (ex: e-learning) can be explored. Today there are lot of free or very reasonably priced courses are available in popular course providers like Coursera, NPTEL, Unacademy, Edx, Academicearth and many of them. Using these platforms students can learn from the best teachers. In this case also students should be given hands-on exercises, assignments and projects where they end up building something. This will further increase their motivation part and make them ready to learn any new technology and practical upliftment as they step into their career.

3. Provide workplace exposure:

When studying in colleges, students are not aware about workplace expectations. Hence awareness is to be created by exposing them with real-time workplace. Internships works very well to bridge the gap between academia and industry, some of the universities in India (ex: VTU) has already made it mandatory as a part of their curriculum. By working on internship, graduates not only learn in terms of their job expectations but also learn about other behavioural aspects. These behavioural aspects include written and oral communication with colleagues and seniors, taking complete ownership of the given work, delivering quality output and learning on real-time tasks. Also, by attending company level common activities like team meeting, offsite-workshops and company all-hands meeting interns can build big picture of how an organization function.

Along with internship students can be made aware about the corporate world by having different engagement programs with the industry. Some of them include having guest lectures by experts, 1:1 mentoring, having experts as project guide, having industry experts as extended faculty etc.

4. Capacity Development:

Capacity development is another important way in which industry-academia gap can be reduced. It should be seen as a long term and continuous improvement mechanism (popularly known as Kaizen principles) using which capacity can be developed across the whole ecosystem. Here are some of the actions that can be taken at different ends.

 Individual: Every individual must take a step to improve their capabilities which include students, faculty and organizations. The learning attitude is yet to be cultivated by different mechanisms using which individual can continue to enhance their knowledge and skills. This will also help an individual to become a life-long learner and adapt to changes as they face in future. With new technologies disrupting traditional ways (ex: Artificial Intelligence), having a learner mindset makes a huge difference.

 Organizational: In India there are number of HEI’s which can be organized better.

Organizational capacity building can be done in form of bringing up better practices of teaching, standardizing evaluation mechanisms and better way of collaboration. There are many umbrella organizations are created like National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) which already has STEP program which can be leveraged across

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different government and privately owned universities along with their colleges. Such common adaptation mechanism will build overall organizational capability.

 Social level: All these capacity building should be done at a social level. This is interactive public administration where a society as a whole should work on. They should take the feedback in the positive manner and start working on it. Social level capacity development is to develop the society as whole.

5. Consistent knowledge transfer:

Lastly, all the above-mentioned points need to be weaved into a consistent knowledge transfer ecosystem. This ecosystem should connect new curriculum development, faculty development programs, developing better teaching practices, building industry partners for internship, having industry expert ecosystem with strong backup from management of engineering colleges and universities. This consistent ecosystem should provide new thoughts and latest happenings in a motivating and thought-provoking manner.

3 CONCLUSION

So, where do we stand now and what has to be done? India stands first in producing a greater number of students but quality and employ ability requires significant improvement. The industry-academia gap needs to be bridged. Across the world motivated and skilled brain is the most precious asset, which is available at large scale in India.

Bridging industry-academia gap plays a very important role in this whole scenario where students, universities, organizations and government need to energize and work together to make it happen!