EV industry grapples with talent shortage, 80% engineering positions go unfilled

Electric Vehicles (EV) makers in India are facing a hard time finding the right talents for the future of mobility.

The automobile companies such as Tata Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Mahindra & Mahindra and Maruti Suzuki are visiting top institutes like IIT, NIT, and govt backed tech colleges for recruitment. What these companies discover is huge demand and supply gap in finding the right talent in the country.

Auto companies are already facing a paucity of engineers. They have only been able to manage only 20-30 per cent of the total requirement.

According to Teamlease report, the current demand for engineers in the field is more than 5,000 engineers, which will go up to 15,000 in the next two years. Whereas only 1,000 engineers are employed in the EV sector.

To address this issues, there is a need to widened demand-supply gap while developing the technologies. Few of the firms have started developing in-house talent pool. Tata Motors is one firm that has been working on it to resolve the talent crunch issue.

Demand for engineers is going to rise in next few years. The auto industry has to brace itself and come up with solutions, Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder, TeamLease told ET.

With the advent of new technology such as AI, robotics, EV and machine learning, companies are now looking for talent with stronger domain knowledge in emerging technologies.

Talent crunch is a long prevalent issue in the country. India sees lakh of engineers graduating out of colleges every year. But the number of engineers passing out does not equal the number getting placement in tech companies.

As per a report by Aspiring Minds, less than 20 per cent of engineers are employable. The problem is low-quality education and outdated syllabus without any practical knowledge.

This requires attention from all the stakeholders. If the quality of skilled labour does not improve, the latest technology that requires updated learning would cause a huge unemployment crisis in the future.