Hyderabad: UGC Chairman highlights new career prospects for students

The UGC chief underscored the need to train the younger faculty on writing a project proposal.

Hyderabad: Highlighting a new career prospect for students, University Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman Prof. M Jagadesh Kumar said prompt engineering is an emerging area, offering large-scale job opportunities in the industry but universities are not ready to offer such courses.

“Today there is an emerging area known as Prompt Engineering. Thousands of prompt engineers are required by the industry but our universities are not ready to offer such courses. Though an engineering tag is there, you can train a commerce or psychology student to become prompt engineers,” the UGC chief said on Friday.

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Participating in a two-day conference on Empowering Education Ecosystem- Resilience and Adaptability: Navigating Challenges in Education organised by the FICCI and TGCHE here, Prof. Kumar said the underemployment was due to gap in skill sets acquired by students in the universities and industries requirement. There was a need to bridge the gap and the UGC was to provide skill education to students as part of their degree programmes.

The UGC chief underscored the need to train the younger faculty on writing a project proposal. “Today there is a need to train our younger faculty on how to draft a project proposal as less than 25 per cent project proposals get the funding,” Prof. Kumar said.

Commissioner of Technical and Collegiate Education A Sridevasena said the State government took a stand to protect the core engineering branches as there were hardly any takers for them and computer science and engineering alone cannot run the country.

Cyient Founder and Chairman Dr. BVR Mohan Reddy said with the change of technology the job landscape has been changing. “There are some jobs of the past like stenographers that we do not even hear about. Several new jobs are appearing at this point of time, like cyber security specialists, data scientists,” he added.