Placements at top engineering colleges pick up steam
The
first two weeks of placements at top engineering colleges hold promise
of a better show than previous years, marking the return of large firms
to campuses.
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New Delhi, December 17, 2013 | UPDATED 15:13 IST
The mood was upbeat at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) -
Bombay after the first two weeks of the final placements for the
academic year 2013-14 that started on December 1. By December 16, the
institute had made 843 placements, with offers coming in from as many as
245 companies. The highest offer, at $135,000, came from durables and
handset major Samsung Korea, which hired 14 candidates for both its US
and Korea offices compared to just one last year. Placement faculty in
charge Avijit Chatterjee is confident of many more companies coming in.
"We are expecting 350 companies to make offers this time round," he
said. "We normally place anywhere between 800 to 900 students every
year, but this year it could be more."
{mosimage}Hiring from
top-notch engineering campuses appears to have seen a revival in the
current year, with some of India's top institutes seeing big companies,
especially from the technology space, swooping down on campuses,
offering high pay packets. This year, a host of multinational companies,
including Microsoft, Samsung, Google, Facebook, Intel, Nomura and
Citicorp, have been active in the Indian campuses, along with home-bred
firms such as Flipkart. IIT-Bombay has seen a 10-15 per cent hike over
last year in the average salary being offered to students on the first
day of campus placements. The institute, like its peers in the country,
keeps the name of the students picked up by companies under wraps.
IIT-Madras saw big firms such as Oracle, Intel Technology and Nomura and
Eaton Technologies make bulk recruitments. IIT Delhi saw around 570
students getting placed upto December 16. "The numbers are more or less
the same as that of last year," says Shashi Mathur, Professor-In-Charge,
Training and Placement Cell of IIT-Delhi. "However, this time, we are
seeing more companies coming in for recruitment, as opposed to fewer
companies making bulk recruitment,"
At IIT-Kanpur on December 1,
students accepted around 125 offers from 20 companies. As many as 225
companies are scheduled to interview students this year compared with
170 last year at the institute. IIT Kharagpur, meanwhile, saw the
highest package of $125,000 in the first few days of the placement.
E-commerce company Flipkart is said to have made 26 offers at Flipkart,
the highest among any IIT. In the final campus placement, students get
picked up in their seventh or eighth semester of their course, and will
be able to join the respective companies by May, after they complete
their graduation.
At IIT-Bombay, the offers came in from a mix of
IT and engineering companies. The top IT companies included Google,
Microsoft, IBM and Linked In, while engineering comprised Shell,
Schlumberger and Eaton. Consulting major Goldman Sachs had a presence
this year, and so did top Indian firms such as Tata Motors and Reliance
Industries. The first phase of the placements will go on upto December
18, and the second phase will start in the second week of January and
continue through July. Google picked up three people for is California
office, and seven for the Indian office. Investment firm WorldQuant made
an offer of Rs 38 lakh a year for a domestic posting to pick up four
students, while private equity major Blackstone offered Rs 35 lakh.
Start-ups vie with established firms
IIT
Rourkee, on the other hand, saw 60 companies making offers at the
campus upto December 6, placing 340 students, mostly from the IT sector.
Some of the major MNCs that came in to recruit from the campus include
Google, Oracle, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Schlumberger. Large
Indian companies that recruited included ITC, Cairn Energy, Tata Motors,
Reliance Industries and Reliance Jio Infocomm. According to Keerthi
Agarwal, student placement co-ordinator at the institute, there were
several start ups that came down to the campus too, including
advertising services company Wooqer, analytics company Axtria, and
management portal Indus Inside. These start-ups are offering salaries in
the range of Rs 8 lakh to Rs 16 lakh per annum. Google made the highest
offer at a whopping $1,25,000 per annum, with additional bonuses and
stock options, for a position at its global headquarters in Mountain
View, California. Overall, around eight students were offered positions
overseas in the first six days of placements at IIT Rourkee.
At
IIT Kharagpur, 250 companies had visited the institute in the first six
days of the placement season, and 400 students were placed. Some of the
major companies that recruited from the campus include Goldman Sachs,
Credit Suisse, Schlumberger Asia Services, Google, IBM, Shell, Abbott,
SAP (Europe), Hindustan Unilever and Housing. The highest domestic
package offered was Rs 37 lakh and the highest offer from abroad $1.25
lakh, said Sudhirkumar Barai, Professor-in-charge, training &
placement.
Recruiters at campuses are broadly categorised into
four - consulting firms, investment banking companies, IT companies
which include internet based firms, and software companies, and
traditional large recruiters. Almost all major Indian companies,
including Reliance Industries, Larsen & Toubro and Asian Paints,
among others, are major recruiters from top-notch campuses.
It was
not just money that drove some students to pick up offers. Two students
of IIT Kanpur are reported to have rejected a Rs 1.31 crore offer from
US technology major Oracle to settle for more challenging but less
paying jobs at Google. Earlier, there had been attempts to pick up
students through campus placements even in the 5th or the 6th semester.
However, this was later dropped as it was seen to interfere with
students' studies.
"Our requirements in terms of trainees who join
the company saw an increase between financial year 2010-11 and 2011-12,"
says Yogi Sriram who heads HR at engineering and construction major
Larsen & Toubro. Thereafter, the pattern of intake has been
consistent with an average total requirement of trainees in categories
such as graduate engineer trainees, post graduate engineer trainees and
diploma trainees, notching up to over 4,000 per year, he added.
Overall picture still grim
Experts
say that the placement environment has turned out to be better for the
top institutes, although the story is not so bright for the Tier 2 and 3
campuses. According to E Balaji, former CEO of manpower consulting firm
Randstad, it is the Tier 1 institutions, such as the IITs, and NITIE
(National Institute of Industrial Engineering at Powai in Mumbai) that
are witnessing an increase in recruitment from top-rung companies, while
many graduates in smaller institutions are left out, either because
large companies do not visit these campuses, or companies do not find
the students employable.
Only 20 per cent of the two lakh graduates
that come out of 3,600 engineering colleges in the country get placed in
suitable jobs. "In that case, there is both unemployment and
underemployment," says Balaji. "Several engineers end up working as
sales executives, so there is no link between what they studied and what
they do." Even premier institutions had found it difficult to place all
their students in the recent past. During 2012-13, as much as 23 per
cent students of IIT-Bombay failed to get a placement, compared to 18
per cent in the year earlier, due to the slowdown. Of the 1,421 students
who registered for the placement programme, only 1,099 or 77 per cent
were offered jobs then.
Several engineering colleges bore the
brunt of the economic slowdown. In the first six months of the current
fiscal, as many as 116 engineering colleges and business schools asked
the technical education regulator All India Council for Technical
Education (AICTE) permission to shut down, compared to 100 in the whole
of 2012-13. In four states, over two lakh engineering seats lay vacant
in the current academic year, as only a fifth of graduates in the
previous year go jobs as slowdown hampered recruitment.
"The
rebound is happening largely in recruitment by IT companies in IITs, but
not beyond that," says Manish Sabharwal, Chairman of Teamlease, a
staffing firm. There are signals that the confidence is coming back in
IT. However, average freshers' salary for IT majors such as Infosys,
Wipro and TCS has remained the same, since there is a glut of engineers
at present. "Recruitment by MNCs make headlines, but do not move the
needle," he added. Engineering and manufacturing companies are not
adding recruits at the entry level, and a rebound to 2007 levels of
recruitment in these sectors is nowhere in sight.
AICTE also said
that the percentage growth in number of engineering institutions in
India has come down from high of 43.2 per cent in fiscal 2009 to 5.3 per
cent in fiscal 2012. "In some cases, half the seats at engineering
colleges are not filled. Also, only half the students that graduate get
jobs in the first year, which is a cause to worry," says Balaji. "The
overall picture is still not rosy."
