New Delhi: Each year around 8 lakh engineering diploma holders graduate in India. However, this entire employable pool of diploma graduates is missed by the knowledge industry, reveals the Aspiring Minds National Employability Report, Diploma, 2016. Diploma graduates have become victim of job gaps and skill gaps  along with stiff competition from graduates and regular engineers.

Aspiring Minds large scale study on engineering diploma holders finds that these engineering diploma holders are finding it difficult to find their space in this wave of new age jobs. “The entire focus of the society is on people with degrees. They miss other disciplines like engineering diploma holders, 8,00,000 of which enter the job market every year. We, for the first time have thrown light on the skills and employability of diploma holders,” said Varun Aggarwal, CTO & Co-Founder, Aspiring Minds.

Even though the proportion of employable diploma holders is not great, a significant chunk of them are employable for knowledge economy jobs. With around 8 lac diploma holders graduating every year, there are  around 8,000 employable programmers, 21,000 employable software testers and 80,000 employable sales and marketing executives that enter the market every year. Surprisingly, the knowledge industry which mainly hires graduates and engineers in such roles is currently missing this huge employable population.

Mapping the skill sets of diploma holders, the report reveals that only 13.92% of male software testers are employable while female counterparts are employable 12.79%. The employability rate of male diploma holders in Sales Executive is 9.51% whereas that of female category is 11.07%. Among marketing executives, 10.79% male are employable while 13.05% female are employable.

Although very few females are enrolled in diploma courses, however, the employability of females is similar to males. A drastically high male-to- female ratio of 4:1 is observed in polytechnic diploma courses. This is in contrast to the male-female ratio of 1.96:1 for engineering graduates. Among the different courses, computer science and IT accounts for the highest proportion of females at 47.4%, while lowest is for mechanical courses at 3.6%. However, females are found to have similar scores to males in skills other than quantitative ability.

The report also focused on employability trends by location of college. Colleges in metro cities have on average 26.6% higher employability than colleges in non-metro cities. Colleges in metro cities have on average 14% employability for engineering technicians, whereas for colleges in non-metro cities, it goes down to 9.2%.