WHERE’S
MY JOB ? – The Hindu dated 15 Dec 2013
The slowing
economy, changing business model of IT companies and fewer industry-ready
candidates have impacted the placement activity in colleges in Tamil Nadu,
barring IIT-M and deemed universities.
Barring IIT-Madras and a few deemed
universities, campus recruitment figures in most engineering colleges in Tamil
Nadu have dropped significantly this year.
College officials say most companies
have resorted to restricting their recruitment numbers by at least 40 per cent
this year, affecting the career aspirations of students. Also, the entry-level
salaries in most IT companies, for graduating engineers has remained unchanged
for the fourth year in a row, at Rs. 3 lakh to Rs. 4 lakh.
Early placement trends from top
campuses in the State indicated that the companies would continue to recruit
students in large numbers, but that was restricted to IIT and the deemed
universities alone. HR officials said that with the bad economy witnessing
little attrition, most companies now have fewer vacancies to fill.
Universities such as VIT University
and SASTRA managed to place most of their students and also attract more
employers this year. Among departments of Anna University, Accenture recruited
204 students and offered to pay an average of Rs. 3.5 lakh per annum.
Microsoft offered the highest package
on the Anna University campus with Rs. 16.5 lakh per annum. Firms such
Accenture and IBM hired more aggressively than others this year.
Dream recruiters such as Ebay, Deloitte,
analytics firm Musigma and Schneider Electric visited reputed engineering
colleges but picked only the best students.
The campus placement at SASTRA has
been good with over 1700 job offers being made by reputed companies such as
Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, Ford, TVS Motors, TCS, Accenture, IBM, and Wipro.
“For the higher benchmarks that
recruiters had this time, the recruitment productivity is reasonably high,”
said S. Vaidhya Subramanian, Dean, Planning and Development, SASTRA.
Changing business
model
The situation in other engineering
colleges is different, with placement officials trying their best to attract
employers. NASSCOM officials had earlier predicted a drop of 17 per cent in IT
hiring, this year. The slowdown could be because companies are focusing on
automation of work that automatically leads to lower intake for work. “Core
companies used to recruit when the need arose, depending on their projects.
Now, IT companies are changing their model of recruitment too, as bulk hiring
is no longer feasible for them,” said R. Rajagopalan, an IT consultant.
“Most top and middle-level colleges,
however, depend on Wipro, Accenture, IBM, TCS, Cognizant and Infosys to take
the bulk of eligible students. With at least three companies sharing the first
day slots, there are multiple offers being made to the same students, which
leaves many students without a single job,” said a placement official in a
tier-1 college.
Mr. Rajagopalan said that the
manpower requirement of IT firms has come down significantly and it is better
for them to hire more people at fewer campuses than spreading their recruitment
over a large number of campuses.
“This means, the numbers in reputed
engineering colleges have gone down, and those in good colleges are not
significant either.”
Academic excellence
Sivagnana Prabhu, head of training,
placement and communications at RMK Group of Institutions, said, “It is getting
tougher for both colleges and students because the industry expectations have
increased. Students have to be really job-ready and skilled to get selected.”
Also, in the last two years, a few
companies have received much flak for taking over eight months to call the
recruited graduates. So, they are more careful, he added.
At this stage, professors feel
excelling at academics has become more important than it was ever before.
“Nearly one-fifth of the engineering
colleges in the State have an overall pass percentage of just about 50 per
cent. With companies insisting on selecting only students with at least 60
percentage and no arrears, just about 70 of the more than 500 colleges in Tamil
Nadu will have any chance of placing at least half their students,” said R.
Chandrasekharan, associate professor and placement in-charge of a reputed group
of engineering colleges.
At a recent industry-academia
interaction organised by Loyola ICAM College of Engineering and Technology
(LICET), A.K. Pattabiraman, Principal Consultant, TCS, said the decreasing
numbers could also be because of the wide disconnect between what the industry
wanted and what the colleges were training their students for.
“Both colleges and companies have to
work together to fill this gap.”
The gap is being addressed in many
colleges. “Regular guest lectures by people from the industry and feedback
about our own students helps. If the company officials are not able to come
here and address students, we are sending our students to various companies to
understand what they really want,” said Jose Swaminathan, Principal, LICET.