Nagaland houses most tech job-ready talent, says survey

One of India’s largest IP-driven incubation labs, BridgeLabz, surveyed its platform to find out which Indian city produces/places the most engineers. The survey base comprised 37,000 engineering graduates across streams who registered for BridgeLabz Tech Employability Quotient (BTEQ) – a tech eligibility test that assesses the candidate on certain parameters before they enroll for any program on the platform.

It assesses each candidate on the basis of his/her average knowledge in five domains viz, Terminals and GIT Commands, Programming Constructs, OOPS Concepts, Java Programming, and Web Development. The score thus produced for each highlights their readiness to be interviewed and join a job. The survey conducted over six months from May to October 2020, gives interesting insights vis-a-vis the readiness of coders pan-India in getting hired for development jobs.

As per the survey figures, Nagaland (122%), Uttarakhand (117%), Meghalaya (112%), Haryana (110%), and Punjab (109%) are amongst the top 15 states (out of total 32 states and UTs) where talent has performed above average. On the other hand, talent from Manipur (53%), Daman & Diu (68%), Arunachal Pradesh (82%), Kerala (88%), and Tripura (88%) performed below average, with Manipur having the least tech employable workforce (out of the remaining 17 states). Surprisingly, Karnataka, the state known for housing the Indian Silicon Valley also falls in this category.

Besides, women engineers have been consistently performing better than their male counterparts in most states, on average. 18 states have women engineers performing better than the overall average as opposed to 15 where men lead the average score. Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh are amongst states which have only women excelling in all the parameters of the test. Gujarat is the only outperforming state wherein both male and female engineers have performed equally well.

Speaking on the survey findings, Narayan Mahadevan, Founder of BridgeLabz, said, “There is a stark distinction between states in terms of job-ready engineers. The technology hub Karnataka has below average-performing talent. A zero percent representation of different cohorts in some states highlights the need for robust technology skilling programs to increase their employability. India needs to ramp up and expand the Job readiness  programs for coding graduates so they can access quality and equal opportunities, no matter which stream or state they belong to. Besides, the domain knowledge fluctuates. Addressing this issue can open doors to numerous opportunities for candidates, critical to surviving the ever-evolving economic landscape.”

Methodology: The BTEQ ( BridgeLabz Tech Employability Quotient test ) tests the current level of job readiness based on 5 key areas which are most prominently required by companies in their fresh employees. The key areas are terminal & GIT commands, Programming Constructs, OOPS Concepts, Java Programming & Web development. The composite score is calculated using the individual scores in the 5 areas. The Average score for the population is represented by 100%. Hence above and below average performance – representing better than average job readiness ( > 100%)  and below par readiness respectively ( <100%)