‘Your skills will fetch you a job’

For Ranjesh Kumar, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam was his role model. Inspired by Dr Kalam’s words, ‘have a great aim in life, continuously acquire the knowledge, work hard and persevere to realise the great achievement’ since childhood, the 28-year-old has imbibed this life mantra and it has helped him achieve his goals. After completing his class 12, Ranjesh’s target was to pursue mechanical engineering from a renowned university and thus, he was offered an admission to the School of Engineering & Technology (SoET), Apeejay Stya University (ASU) with a scholarship.

Currently, the Apeejay alumnus is working as a Senior Station Controller with Gujarat Metro Rail Corporation Ltd. In this interview, he highlights the need to learn coding or programming languages and develop skillsets to become future-ready. Read edited excerpts:

Do you think engineering is a good career option?

Firstly, one must be very passionate about pursuing mechanical engineering. If you are pursuing this subject just to get a degree and thinking you will get a job, I would suggest not to go for it. It won’t be like that. To pursue mechanical engineering, one needs to nurture problem-solving skills, brainstorm ideas, and think out of the box. Moreover, one should start gaining hands-on experience early on through field trips, internships, and working on DIY projects. With knowledge of different softwares, one can take up Autocad jobs. Also, work on concepts because just bookish knowledge isn’t enough.

Do you think digitisation and digital tools are playing a great role in the field of mechanical engineering?

Of course! There is software everywhere whenever you want to try and test something in any field or sector. For instance, if you are building a pipe in an oil and gas company, you have to have the knowledge of computational fluid dynamics like how the oil moves, ways to modulate the pressure or what material should be used. Integration of technology is taking place in every aspect, therefore one must strive to learn about new technologies and digital tools. Besides the classroom lessons, there are a lot of open source platforms where you can enroll yourself to learn new languages, tools and technical courses. You just need to take that extra step.

What do students learn from academic/live projects? How does it make them career-ready?

Selection of academic projects plays an important role and it should be done with the support of a mentor, who has an industrial experience. If you are trying to work on any academic project but you have no idea how this would work in the real world, then it won’t be of any use. Mentors guide students from an industry perspective that how a particular project is relevant to the industry.  When I went for an industrial training programme, I learnt a lot of new things and those are so helpful in today’s job profile.  I learn 5S (Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardized & Sustain) concept, Kaizen – Continual Improvement, JIT – Just in Time. Knowledge of these makes you industry-ready.