The pandemic, wars and economic slowdown have dampened the hopes of engineering students looking for college placements this year. Absence of mass-recruiters, a fewer hirings and a more rigorous selection process are a cause of worry for the job seekers.
“Compared to the previous years, there is a notable absence of mass recruiters this year,” said Kalyani Joshi, principal of PES Modern College of Engineering. Joshi added that the number of companies that hiring freshers and the packages offered can fluctuate based on economic conditions and industry demand.
According to reports, IT service firms have been hiring less than half of the freshers they hired last year. Companies such as TCS, Wipro, Infosys and HCL have considerably reduced their intake.
“Over 25 per cent less students have been placed as of October first week compared to the same time last year even though the number of companies coming to hire has been the same. This is a trend we noticed with core industry companies because we do not invite mass-recruiters as such,” said Nilisha Itankar, head of placements at Symbiosis Institute of Technology.
Companies that would hire seven to eight students earlier have cut down to 3-4 each, said Raju Ladhwe, training and placement officer of COEP Technological University. “However, we do not rely on mass-recruiters and have plenty of companies coming in so that our overall placement numbers are not being affected,” he said.
He agreed that the hiring process has become much more rigorous with several written tests, two or more interviews and extra rounds and the final number of selected students is lesser than before.
As a result of mass-recruiters like Infosys and Wipro barely hiring, core industries that correspond to the engineering branch of students have become the more-favoured choice.
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Ganesh Kakandikar, associate dean of External Relations at MIT World Peace University, pointed out that before the pandemic about 60 per cent of engineering students from across branches would go for jobs in the IT service sector but that number has reduced to roughly 25 per cent. More students are now going for core industries, Kakandikar said.
“Moreover, the boom in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning had earlier prompted more students to go into the IT field. But now more and more are realising that you cannot do too much with AI and ML alone, you need an industry where you can use them as tools,” he added,
If previous data is anything to go by, it is possible that the salary packages may not reduce even if the number of placements goes down. The average salary package at COEP saw a jump from 9.70 LPA (lakh per annum) in 2021-22 to 11.20 LPA in 2022-23 even though the percentage of students placed saw a slight dip from 77.4% to 74.6%. A similar correlation was seen at Symbiosis as well.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First published on: 11-10-2023 at 14:09 IST
