Dr. Santosh Shriram Sonavane
Pro-Vice Chancellor
Vijaybhoomi University

In the Post-Covid era, future job market can yield positive results by equipping young people with the right skills to navigate these turbulent seas and show the way forward for India. Covid-19 accelerated digital transformation by 7 years and a report from World Economic Forum states that 84% employers are set to rapidly digitalise the workplace, and about 44% see will potentially more their workeforce to remote working. Also, there will be an 85 million global talents shortage and $85 trillion in opportunity cost.

The apprenticeships mostly follow an approach of training younger generations a specific trade through on-the-job training. It may seem that apprenticeships were used only in the days gone by, but that is not the case. Most Industries today still use apprenticeships to advance knowledge for young professionals, and the same is true for the tech industry.

It is easy to mistakenly think that an apprenticeship is the same as an internship. Internships are mainly for students who are looking to gain experience or see how they would enjoy a particular career. They are often unpaid and tasked with minimal duties in the company. The goal of an internship is to gain experience in a specific industry and see if it is something one could be doing full time by themselves. Internships have a set period of time that a student or recent graduate will work for, usually lasting a semester.

On the other hand, an apprenticeship is targeted towards recent graduates who are looking for real-life experience in the industry. They are often paid for their work and are given important duties and tasks that impact the team. Apprentices usually have more responsibilities than a traditional intern. They also have the opportunity to make real contributions to the tech team. The goal of someone working in an apprenticeship is that afterwards, they will be rewarded with a full-time position at the company. Furthermore, the length of apprenticeships can vary between companies, lasting from months to sometimes years. Thus, Apprenticeship will help graduates to become industry ready and employable by having a curriculum where they can go for apprenticeship for at least two years to get the necessary industry exposure.

Software engineers are required to develop, design, maintain, modify and debug software. These qualities are a combination of both the soft and technical skills needed for efficiency in the workplace. Software engineering skills are abilities required by software developers to create, maintain and operate computer programs used by businesses and organizations.

At Vijaybhoomi University, considering the requirement of an industry-ready Engineer in the future, the BE course is designed in Software Engineering which is more about skill and competence and ability to learn. This course is a work-study degree program designed to grow multidisciplinary software development talents with a mix of 21st-century cutting edge technological expertise like Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing with small to medium scale enterprise applications development.

The work2learn journey of the learners begins with an intensive 12-month coding boot camp where they will clock up on industry practitioners in over 2000 hours of guided training and personalized mentoring.

The boot camp enables the learner to acquire the skills to develop web applications using the front-end tools and technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, jQueryUI, Ajax, Angular, and Struts framework, and MySQL Database. Besides, they obtain skills to create a single page, responsive websites using the Bootstrap framework, and human-centric, interactive prototypes using Axure.

In addition to that, they acquire the skills to develop small to medium-sized enterprise applications using the Spring framework, Angular, React, and Liferay portals. Besides, they obtain skills to create competitive digital marketing ideas based on actionable customer insights by integrating applications with digital platforms such as Facebook, Google, and PayPal using Webhooks.

Learners will gain Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning using Python and R programming with the concepts like Statistics and data visualization techniques.

The course enables them to be an all-rounder with professional communication strategies, interpersonal skills, collaboration skills with digital marketing, and entrepreneurship skills that play a vital role in the modern workplace.

In a nutshell, the curriculum provides a holistic view of integrated design and development experience to learners starting from requirements gathering to maintenance using the agile methodology. Also, they learn the different types of functional and non-functional testing methods to evaluate the project and manage the problems by adopting industry best practices to enable them to become Enterprise Application Developers with cutting edge competencies of the 21st century such as AI, ML, NLP, and digital entrepreneurship, professional communication skills, agile leadership, and project management to work in a modern multicultural environment.

The apprenticeship in Software engineering in the IT and ITES industry is important because specific software is needed in almost every industry, in every business, and for every function. With global-ready skills and 2 years of full-time working experience under their belt, the learners will double their salary on graduation compared to graduates from conventional degree programs.

Large tech companies such as Google, Airbnb, IBM, Accenture, BGG, Cognizant, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Alibaba Cloud, ANZ, Deloitte, LinkedIn etc had tied up to offer apprenticeships. These large companies, along with others in the tech industry, offer a software development apprenticeship to teach and gain expertise in coding and, in the long run, fill vacant positions on their team.