Gurmeet Dhaliwal,
Chairman,
Baba Farid Group of Institutions (BFGI),
Highlights the key issues plaguing the higher education sector and shares steps taken by BFGI to overcome them. In conversation with Seema Gupta.
On Employability
The biggest hurdle in employability is that majority of students opt their career by chance not by their choice and also the absence of skills evaluation system and for the same we have developed a student employability scorecard at BFGI
What is the vision behind setting up Baba Farid Group of Institutions (BFGI)?
We dream to make students financially independent during study and provide with 100 percent placement to our students after completion of their education.
What are the challenges faced by upcoming private higher education institutions?
The challenges faced by upcoming private higher education institutions include:
- Inadequate financial assistance from government for research
- Outdated curriculum
- Creating employable professionals from completely unskilled freshers
- Lack of availability of skilled and research-oriented faculty
- Less focused students as they have chosen career by chance but not by choice
- Lack of industry-academic interface
What are the steps taken by BFGI, to increase employability of students, which is currently a major concern in India?
At BFGI, firstly we ensure that students opt for a course after making proper career choice. To facilitate that we have established a department of career guidance and counselling that conducts online and offline aptitude tests. Another hurdle is the absence of skills evaluation system and for the same we have developed a student employability scorecard.
There is also lack of skills among the students. BFGI is taking several steps to counter this deficiency. We conduct internal training for students, which is a crucial part of our curriculum and timetable. The unique feature is that we have a dedicated team of more than 25 trainers who strive hard to provide right platform to the students not just by enhancing their skills but also by evaluating these students through student employability scorecard.
Internal trainings are not only sufficient to accomplish the goal of overall development thus, we have collaborated with reputed corporate giants like HP, HCL, Wipro and Manpower for providing students with professional training both on technical and non-technical fronts.
We have also collaborated with AIESEC to provide summer internship programme from six to eight weeks in order to give global exposure to our stu-dents and making them open towards inter-cultural diversity.
Our students participate in stipendbased live projects with big industry giants in order to accomplish the objective of Earn while Learn.
Please share with us some research or innovative projects undertaken by students or faculty at BFGI.
We have a dedicated innovation centre in collaboration with Microsoft Corporation. We have established DATA64 Centre of excellence where live case studies are carried on cyber crime.
IT giant Apple has selected and uploaded a 3D iPhone game “Salvador” developed by one of our student. Also one of our students has developed a working project on Live Bidding of scrap and faulty materials for Jindal Steel Group, Delhi.
Besides all these projects, our students and faculty members are consistently working on research-oriented activities.
