oa An effective framework for industry-academia collaboration

Industries readily employ talent with versatility and industry-ready skills. The business challenge is that the fresh engineering students, who are tested during recruitment and hired, should be employable and be productive – aware of IT industry landscape, technology areas, aware of their role, and the competencies that need to be demonstrated in IT industry. However, the employability factor of on-campus engineering students is about 20–25%, due to the student's low exposure to industry awareness, and they are not aware of current trends and industry expectations. Infosys has developed a framework – Campus Connect (CC) – to address this.

While there are other collaborating platforms to share best practices between industry and academia, this paper describes a framework for effectively collaborating industry and engineering institutions in India. Industry-academia relationship is low in India, except at the premier engineering institutes. CC provided an opportunity to work with non-premier engineering institutes to bridge this gap and help design an industry-based curriculum to enhance students' employability. The number of graduates from the premier institutes is not sufficient to meet IT industry needs. Hence Infosys believes that the quality of students in non-premier institutes has to be enhanced. Infosys also believes in a program which is both scalable and sustainable. The CC program was initiated in 2004, to bridge the ‘quality’ gap in skills and competencies of fresh engineering graduates and the ‘quantity’ gap between the needs of a high-growth industry and the employable pool of graduates. The decade-long program aims to enable engineering college faculty members, students and management for systematic implementation.

The framework has helped improve the rollout rate by 38% and reduce the lead-time for rollout by 132%, with a network of over 400 engineering colleges in India.