The second day of CII Education Summit saw the launch of first-ever Industry Proficiency Aptitude Test for Engineers (iPATE) which is set to revolutionize corporate hiring of engineers in the country. The test will provide a fully-digital scientific assessment of industrial aptitude of an engineer across all engineering disciplines, industry domains and functional areas such as design, inspection, quality control, erection, testing, commissioning, project management, operations and maintenance.
India has among the world’s highest number of engineers. B.Tech graduates who primarily aspire for higher studies and working in PSUs take the GATE exam which tests their technical knowledge. There are virtually no benchmarks, other than in IT domain, to assess the industrial aptitude and proficiency of engineering graduates in core sectors. As a result, students see no milestone to achieve, to be industry ready.
Industry, on the other hand, finds it tough to scout for competent engineers. Hiring technical resources across geographies involves huge time, effort and cost. Talent from tier 2 & 3 cities is not easily accessible by most small and medium sized companies (SMEs). They are also not equipped with proper technical evaluation teams for effective hiring.
To address this gap from both sides, CII iPATE will evaluate technical competency of engineers through scientific and automated processes, across geographies. This three-hour online assessment will provide ready-made or customized recruitment strategy to corporates, match requirement across domains and functional areas and reduce candidate filtration time, cost and effort significantly.
The three pillars of CII iPATE will be an assessment of basic concepts (physics, chemistry, maths); domain knowledge and cognitive abilities. In order to hand-hold students to ace this assessment, which will become their gateway to the corporate world, CII iPATE will first do a strength and weakness analysis of every candidate. They will then be provided upskilling opportunities through study material, videos, discussion forums, mock tests and interactions with industry professionals. Once they are ready to take the final test, they will be provided the assessment and certification.
The on-line platform will be highly secured private cloud Environment with Multi-level Authentications & Role based Access Control, Safe Exam Browser and Proctoring. Question Bank curated by subject matter experts, from Academia & Industries with Scientific validations with Continuous upgradation with industry inputs.
The CII iPATE certificate for an engineer will provide feedback on three fronts - overall score which will include percentage and grading as well as percentile and ranking. There will be a sectional score on basic concepts, domain knowledge and cognitive abilities and there will be a demographic score which will be across disciplines, industry domains, functional areas and geographical areas (institute, university, state, region etc.)
14 November 2019
New Delhi