“Today, everybody wants to be an engineer but no one wants to be in the Profession of Engineering” :: Dr. Shounak Roy Chaudhary, Assistant Dean, JGBS

I left Engineering at least five years back, and now I am an Administrator in an MBACollege.  But I’ll try to be as relevant as possible. I think I’ll interpret the question a bit differently. Can Engineers catapult India’s growth story? I think they already have. Most of the people who are leading India today happen to be engineers. So possibly this is not a relevant question, rather, we’ll move in terms of how can engineers catapult India’s growth story. It is not about Engineers. It is more about Engineering. And engineering as a science needs attention. And I’m totally in favour for that argument.  The problem is, most of the engineers including me, are accidental engineers. I became an engineer because my neighbor became an engineer. When my father asked what will you do, I said engineering because my brother was already in an engineering college. Most of the engineers are born accidently. And somehow you made it through, and go on. Then what to do? Tata Motors give good engineering jobs. So, I entered the R&D team of TATA motors. My job was to supervise the disassembling of the entire truck. And figure out what they have changed, and suggest what I could do to improve the truck. This is the most innovative thing that I did.  Then I began to think “What am I doing!”. And I thought if reverse engineering is the way ahead, I should talk about reverse engineering as a specific discipline, and not engineering. I moved on to a few other Companies, and understood that everywhere the R&Ds happen to be the same. Figure out what the others are doing and figure out how we can improve or modify ours. Then I moved to Management.  I realised how dominant engineering thinking has been in our education.  For example once  I was having a small conversation with a Chancellor he asked, why don’t  you offer specializations? And I said, if Management is about generalization, what is the need of specialization? He said that everybody has it. But actually nobody has it. Then I thought, why did this come up? It comes up because there are divisions in Engineering called Power Technology, Instrumentation Engineering, Mechanical Engineering. Because it is in Engineering, it has to be replicated also in Management.   And if that is the way that things are getting viewed, then it is an indication of how prevalent the engineering thought process is in our mentality. And we struggle to move beyond it. I do say that boosting of innovations and more research output is necessary, but then, it cannot happen without specific impetus from the industry.Today, everybody wants to be an engineer but no one wants to be in the profession of engineering. Once you have graduated BTech, your next step is to get into some IIM, some  Harvards, some Frankfurts and become an MBA, because nobody wants to do the dirty job. Therefore unless there is a larger systemic intervention which is imposed by the corporates which says that there is a career path for you in Engineering, beyond reverse engineering.  The second thing is that  because of lot of explosions in the education systems, it has become easy today to acquire an engineering degree or an MBA degree. We know that a  job today as an engineer with MBA is equivalent to a diploma maybe 20 years back. Degrees and requirements have changed, but the basic requirement of job hasn’t. An IIT graduate with an MBA from IIM in an operations job does the same job that my father did as a diploma, 25 years back. Therefore an innovation is required at the mentality level. An entirely different thought process will set in. Re-conceptualising  must be there for the entire engineering system, not just in innovations, not just the career, the entire ecosystem has to be geared up, and thought differently .