Strategic Partnership with Industry to Strengthen Core Competency in Electronics - Need, Opportunities, Challenges and Success Stories

India has over 3000 engineering colleges graduating about 1.5 million engineers annually. Inspite of this huge framework in place, ultimate absorbers of these talented young professionals i.e. industry still faces challenge in recruiting right kind of manpower. Surveys do indicate that only about 18% and 8% engineering graduates are employable in Information Technology (IT) and core companies respectively. Various reasons like dated education system, processes leading to rote learning of students and lack of collaborations between industry and academia are the most commonly cited reasons for these highly undesirable results. To overcome these challenges, we at Chitkara University have strategically entered into collaboration with many Electronics industries of repute so as to draw the maximum benefit in terms of producing manpower which is much more employable. This paper highlights summary of various such initiatives, obstacles faced while implementing the same and the methodologies adopted to overcome those so as to get favourable results.