When the Job You Trained for Doesn't Exist in Ten Years: Dr Cavita Taragi, Pro Chancellor, Chitkara University

The real test of a degree isn't whether it lands you your first job. It's whether it still means something ten years into your career. When a family picks a university, there's usually one question underneath everything else: will this get my kid a good job? Fair question. A placement report answers it. But stopping there misses half the point. A degree that gets you hired at twenty-two and then quietly stops being useful hasn't done its job. The market you step into fresh out of college rarely looks anything like the one you're working in a decade later, and that gap keeps stretching as things move faster each year.

That's really the harder question a university has to answer: not just "can this person get hired," but "will this person still be worth hiring when their whole field has changed shape." That's a much tougher thing to teach. And honestly, it's the real test of whether an institution is keeping up or quietly falling behind.

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The classroom-workplace gap didn't have to happen

Employers have been saying the same thing for years — graduates show up with the theory but can't apply it. It gets talked about like some unavoidable fact of life, this gap between what gets taught and what work actually demands. It's not unavoidable. It's a choice. A curriculum can be written once in a faculty room and left to gather dust for ten years, or it can stay in constant contact with the industries it's supposedly preparing people for. Those two approaches don't produce the same graduate.

You can spot the difference long before placement season rolls around — in whether a student's worked on a real industry problem or just a textbook version of one, whether they've touched the tools their field actually runs on, whether they've spent time with someone who actually does the job. Where that's part of the degree, the jump into a first job tends to be shorter, with less time spent relearning fundamentals on an employer's dime.

Relevant doesn't have to mean narrow

There's a legitimate worry tangled up in all this. If a degree gets tuned too closely to what industry wants this year, doesn't that leave graduates exposed the moment those particular skills go out of fashion? It's a real concern — and it's exactly why genuine industry engagement can't just mean teaching whatever software happens to be trending.

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Done properly, it works the other way around. A student who's actually watched how an industry thinks — how it frames a problem, weighs trade-offs, adjusts when circumstances change — walks away with something much more durable than familiarity with one tool. They've learned how to keep learning inside a field that refuses to stay still. That's the real reason relevance and rigour aren't opposites. Theory tells you why something works; industry exposure shows you what happens when that theory runs into a deadline, a budget, and an actual client. A university that's serious about this owes students both, or it hasn't really given them either.

What deliberate looks like in practice

This is where "industry-academia collaboration" stops being a phrase on a brochure and turns into something a student actually does. At Chitkara University in Punjab, it's woven into how students learn, not stapled onto the curriculum afterward. Industry engagement isn't a once-a-year careers fair — it shows up in live projects, internships, certifications, and applied work done alongside people who do this for a living. The idea is a loop, not a one-time handoff: industry flags what's shifting, the curriculum adjusts, students work with current tools and live problems, and whatever employers notice afterward feeds back into what gets taught next round.

You see this most clearly in the labs. Chitkara runs over fifty Centres of Excellence built alongside industry partners — the Apple iOS Development Centre, the Cisco Networking Lab, the SAP Innovation Lab, the Capgemini Code Experience Center, JioGames Innovation Centre, the Honda Design Lab, the Dassault Systèmes Lab. These aren't company names slapped on for branding — students are actually working with the tools and systems those industries run on, which is a completely different experience from reading about them in a textbook. The same thinking runs through the degrees too, increasingly built together with the sectors that will need them: an electric-vehicle engineering programme developed with ARAI, India's top automotive research body; an AI and Machine Learning degree built with Microsoft; an MBA in Data Science and AI shaped alongside EY India; a Fintech programme developed with Deloitte.

**Why the placement number only tells part of the story**

Over three thousand recruiters show up on Chitkara's campuses each year — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, PwC, EY, Deloitte, Adobe, Infosys, and IBM among them. That's a solid number and a meaningful one. But a placement record is the end result of a much longer process, not the process itself. Recruiters keep returning at that scale because of everything that happens before they walk in — curriculum shaped with industry input, the labs, the hands-on projects, graduates who need less hand-holding than their peers elsewhere. The number is what shows up at the end. The relevance underneath it is what keeps that number holding up year after year.

The same logic applies beyond hiring too. International partnerships and global pathway programmes with schools like Arizona State University, Deakin University, York University, and George Brown Polytechnic give students a taste of academic and professional life outside India. That matters more each year, in a job market that doesn't really respect national borders anymore.

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A university can't keep teaching for a world that no longer exists. Fields shift, tools get replaced, entire professions rise and disappear within a single working career. The institutions that will actually matter going forward are the ones that treat that constant churn as something to build around, not a problem to patch up later.

For a student or a family trying to decide, the real question isn't just where graduates end up getting placed, it's whether that education will still hold up a decade from now. A degree proves its worth not on graduation day, but across the thirty years that follow it. Keeping that education relevant over all those years might be the harder thing to measure in a university and it deserves just as much attention as the first job does.

Disclaimer: This article has been published as a part of marketing collaboration between Careers360 and Chitkara University.