India has one of the largest working population,yet we face a talent crunch. As per a Quartz India article, less than 5% of Indian engineers can write a functionally & logically correct code.Most employers struggle to find proper tech freshers who have practical skills(Thread)1/8

If entrepreneurs cannot find the right talent, how do we expect to compete with the developed west? Talent, expertise with real problem-solving skill is the largest vacuum that the industry faces now. For any industry to scale, we urgently need to fill up this vacuum. 2/8

It is a vicious cycle. Freshers lack fundamental skills and are often limited to bookish knowledge. The experienced ones are not up to date with the recent niche areas. Both cannot bring a holistic approach to problem solving which is specifically important for AI &ML. 3/8

Most mass-recruiters recruit in bulk and fail to teach coding n problem-solving skills to the thousands of engineers who are mostly glorified data entry operators. This results in mediocre coding culture as most would just google/stackoverflow n then do a copy pasting job. 4/8

In India instead of upscaling/upgrading, we are downgrading ourselves. Indian coders should have more cross functional people coming from diverse background as law, sociology, psychology, systems design, physics, and Biology. The sooner the better. 5/8

I as a MediaTech CEO have found a partial solution, albeit temporary. This is on-the-job training. Sponsoring short courses for employees may help develop their specific skills in the short-run and will also help build a very good ecosystem. 6/8

Only 4% of AI professionals in India worked on cutting-edge technologies like deep learning and neural networks. So, the structural overhaul that is required to change this scenario is to change our educational system from being theoretical to industry-aligned. 7/8

We need cross-functional education to advance in AI. In India, we do not have other disciplines entering coding & AI except engineers. For us to compete worldwide, we need to work on our educational infrastructure that promotes holistic, problem-solving based education. 8/8