Value Added Courses, a magic term in the employability of students, especially Engineering students. Due to various restrictions in engineering curriculum design in terms of total number of credits, inclusion of mandatory courses, etc., the industry and skill related courses are not included.But, these value additions do tons and tons of magic in getting placements for freshers. On campus and off campus recruitment processes keenly target on value additions rather than academic results.
For example, If you buy a mobile phone, what do you ask or search to select a mobile phone? RAM…., Internal Storage…, Pixel of camera…. Speed of the Processor.., ..mmm…Display size and refresh rate….etc., etc.,
Okay… What are these?… all Value additions…. Do you worry about, how good this phone for speaking…. No….Because, you know all the phones are useful in connecting people for speaking.
See..the selection of mobile phone is predominantly depends on value additions. The same analogy is perfectly matching in your job market. Being an engineer your B.E/B.Tech degree is mandatory like a passport, but your placement in industry purely depends on your domain skill, apart from syllabus.
Objectives of Value added Courses
- The primary objective is to improve the employability skills of engineering students.
- In order to provide additional learner centric , graded skill oriented technical training.
- To understand the industrial expectations and bridge the gap in Curriculum.
- To introduce courses on creativity and innovation to stimulate problem-solving skills for future engineers.
Necessity of Value Added Courses
Industries require potential, skillful manpower in contemporary technologies. Because, Industrial automation revolutionize the entire product cycle process. If you qualify yourself in the latest , sophisticated technologies your placement is much easier. Your curriculum alone can not help you in this regard. Do a small research about what the latest technologies are in practice in your core domain. Then, find out the ways to train yourself in any one of those technologies based on your interest.
“Other than the technologies, the soft skills like, communication skills, problem-solving capacity, documentation and presentation will certainly help graduates to be employable. This is called as CDP (Communication, Documentation and Presentation) skill. With the help of such value added courses these CDP can be improved a lot. These skills will show you as an unique candidate in among others “
The AICTE and its accreditation body NBA strongly propose the effective implementation of Outcome Based Education (OBE) through Programme Outcomes(PO) with emphasis on better employability for Engineering students. Also, emerging areas like AI, IoT, Robotics, Block chain, Machine learning, Data Science and Cyber security are recommended to produce Industry ready Engineers.
Skill development is very essential process in sustainable development of the nation.This will change the informal economy to formal economy. Value added courses are a critical breakthrough in capacity building of a student.
During the COVID-19 pandemic everybody loses the job day by day. Up skilling will do the magic in finding the alternate profession. Up skilling is possible through value added courses.
Individuals might develop these skills through value added courses, to make them eligible for industrial deployment.
Value Added Courses instead of Internship
Most of the requirements of Industry are interdisciplinary in nature and requires the knowledge of multiple domains; they need to be included in the curriculum of multiple disciplines.But this is not practically possible.
Mandatory industry internships are helpful to freshers to get to know the industry work culture and help them to prepare themselves in that direction. The real time project work, to undertake projects offered by the industries, can be a great employability booster.
A must 5 minutes Read blog : "Internship : A Professional Job hunting Exercise to Students" But, getting internships in good companies are again a challenge especially to rural students. So, this gap is bridged by Value added courses.
Hope this blog helps you in finding the answer for 1.What is Value added course? 2. Why Value added courses? 3. Benefits or impacts of value added Courses
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