Engineering students suffering from lack of industry exposure will now be able to study six electives offered by top IT companies like IBM, Oracle and Infosys as part of their courses from this academic year.

The courses to be offered exclusively in the Jawahar Knowledge Centres (JKCs) of select colleges are aimed at infusing necessary skills required by the industry to make them job-ready even while pursuing engineering courses.

Among these electives, three will be offered by IBM, two by Oracle and one by Infosys. IBM will enable JKC colleges in training and certifying their associates and students on technologies such as DB2, RAD, Tivoli and Cloud Computing. Oracle will provide ‘Oracle Introductory’ and ‘Oracle Advanced’ as electives to the second and third year students. Infosys will offer Business Communication Skills.

“All the six electives will not be offered across all the colleges but distributed based on the need, interest and enthusiasm shown,” says Amarnath Reddy Atmakuri, CEO, AP Society for Knowledge Networks.

These will help in building a competitive IT workforce and students taking these will have advantage over their peers in placement sessions. Internal surveys and several reports suggest that a good number of engineering students lack English language skills despite strong core skills.

They suffer from comprehending complex sentence structures thus not receiving complete information and face difficulty in delivering structured articulation of messages.

Moreover, their poor listening skills result in instances of miscommunication. All these result in fear of presenting their ideas. “The Business Communication Skills programme of Infosys will plug these gaps,” Mr. Reddy said.