VISAKHAPATNAM: Engineering colleges based in and around Visakhapatnam should revise their approach to improve manifold the employment potential of their students.

At an interaction held among the educational institutions and the industry, the college managements were asked to try for changing their curriculum to make the study material on par with international standards.

CEO of Symbiosys Technologies O. Naresh Kumar said that there should be efforts to make students learn programming languages like .net, java and databases, including oracle, while in the third year and prepare them in areas of DBA and Microsoft-certified .net.

The students should be encouraged to take up projects for six months in the final year.

They should learn type writing lower or higher while pursuing their course.

Spoken English

Shyam Kumar Kolluru, Vice-President (business development) of Symbiosys Technologies told The Hindu on Saturday that focus should be on speaking like call centre executives.

Improving their spoken English should not be a crash course and it should be made part of the course.  The students should be taught on reducing greed desires, importance of stability, clarity of understanding and public speaking. Learning one or two foreign languages would be added advantage.

Special fund

Mooting establishment of faculty upgradation fund, the city-based software company suggested that the government should take the initiative to send at least two faculties from each college to the US, Europe or some well-known technical institute to upgrade their skills.

The colleges should also be motivated to have tie-up with world famous institutes and have regular videoconferencing for international exposure.  The curriculum should be revised by incorporating good practices followed by five top institutes in the world.