Rekha Lakshminarayanan is a gold medallist in engineering. At 21, she looked forward to moving from her father’s farm in Vijipura in Karnataka and climbing corporate ladders in the big city. But like many of her batch mates, Rekha soon found she wasn’t welcome there. “I attended three interviews and got knocked off like a bowling pin,” she says. “I wasn’t given any reasons for being dumped.” Now 24, Rekha is working her way up in ZeOmega, a small product engineering firm. Naturally, she feels left behind. “I faced three problems,” she says. “My college left us unprepared in terms of current technology. Secondly, my English was bad. And finally, I find that my workplace offers me no evaluation — I have to set my own career path.”

Rekha’s dismay is shared by millions of young, equally at sea Indian graduates. The lack of employability, that ability to find and keep work with the aid of the innocuous-sounding yet potent KSAs (knowledge, skills and attitudes), haunts dimmed stars like Rekha, as well as a hitherto complacent industry, which needs her more than she knows.

The scale of the problem is considerable. It is expected that IT, manufacturing, product engineering, retail, financial services and insurance sectors will employ the largest numbers of Indians in the coming years. A Frost & Sullivan report on the electronics industry finds that India’s equipment consumption will rise to $363 billion by 2015, up from 2007’s $28.2 billion (Rs 1,15,620 crore). That means, in a few years from now, the automotive, medical, and electronics and storage devices sectors will generate 3 million jobs for engineers, besides 5 million more in the related services. Not all of these jobs will be filled by graduates from metros. Already, companies are moving to tier-II and III cities for talent.