Placements galore!

If reports from some of the bloggers are anything to go by, engineering college students might be in for a bumper placement this year. I got wind of this after Govar and Visher put up posts on the same. Even Business Line had mentioned that engineers from premier institutes never had it so good.

While all this is good for the economy and for the students, the recruiters lobby is now beginning to show its might. Since most of these IT companies recruit in large numbers (often called as “truck companies” in campuses) they will find it difficult to absorb all of them in one go. Since these companies have a constraint in terms of the training capacity, they try to schedule the intake in such a manner that a particular number of people join them each week / month. For an engineering graduate who has secured a job with one of these IT majors, this wait can often be in the range of 3 to 12 months. This wait can often be quite agonizing as well.

The industry lobby is now pushing the engineering colleges to adopt a system whereby two batches of students graduate every year (with a gap of 6 months between each batch). If this system is implemented, the IT companies feel that the waiting time for new joinees can come down drastically. Not sure whether this system will create a 6 month gap between the Class 12 (+2) exams and the joining date at the engineering colleges. Some of the IT companies might have very similar training programs and if some industry body is set-up, they can impart part of this training during the final year of engineering. By doing so, they can cut down the training period little bit.

This might be a good move in the short term as it is beneficial to the employers and the potential employees. If the IT boom subsides, the governing body of these colleges needs to revisit the utility of such a campus calendar. There has been no reaction yet from the colleges. It would be good to see some progress in this area.