Slowdown: Specialization can still help fetch IT jobs

BANGALORE, INDIA: The pinch ofeconomic slowdown is being felt harder than ever before. IT majors and emerging enterprises have started differing or canceled job offers to fresh engineering graduates to cut down on cost of operations. Today, fresh graduates have lower job openings than ever before putting their careers in jeopardy.

Despite the freeze in recruitments, a handful of fresh engineering graduates can still manage to get job offers almost as lucrative as in the boom days. In an interview with CIOL, Kamal Mansharamani, MD and CEO of AlmaMate, a Noida-based institute that specializes in making unemployable fresh graduates to instantly billable candidates, talked about what is ailing our colleges, the specializations that industry looks among candidates and jobs in high demand in India.

Excerpts:

CIOL: What are the reasons for low percentage of employability among fresh engineering/MCA graduates in India ?

Kamal Mansharamani: During the last 10 years, the IT industry has grown at 30 percent annually thus creating a huge demand for fresh engineering graduates. Though the number of colleges in this stream have increased, many of them lack quality faculty or infrastructure.

In many states of India, engineering colleges are still following the old curriculum. All these factors are contributing to lack of employable young graduates. Only 25 percent of the fresh graduates from Indian colleges are said to be employable due to lack of specialization.

CIOL: How has been the response to NASSCOM’S NAC-tech initiative ?

KM: NASSCOM is trying to create a standard test evaluation process which will enable corporates to easily access talented students without having to spend too much on campus recruitments. Under the NAC-tech initiative, students are tested for skills in various

competencies including reasoning, verbal communication while his/her score is loaded to the NASSCOM site.

The initiative, which was started in 2008, is gaining popularity. So far about 20,000 students have taken the test and the numbers are expected to more than double in 2009.

CIOL: How is AlmaMate career development program helping students to prepare to face the industry challenges ?

KM: The program is designed to make fresh engineering graduates billable employees from day one in the industry. The program has a 260-hr module. At the end of course, students become IT industry ready. If a company wants to hire a candidate, it takes six months to become a billable employee whereas we just take one1 month.

CIOL: Which are domain specializations that are in high demand ?

KM: Demand for specialization in telecom, financial services and retail have seen greater demand in India. We at AlmaMate, first go to IT companies (mostly medium enterprises) to study their requirements. Our courses are designed to train students in the domains that are in demand in the industry and our course module devotes about 180 hours in technical training.

CIOL: What will be the impact of the economic slowdown in India with respect to recruitments in the IT industry ?

KM: The Indian IT industry which has been growing at 30 percent is slowing down in the times of recession, particularly the finance and retail sectors. Due to the down turn in economy, students of 2008 batches is going to be impacted harder. Many corporates which have made job offers to students have either differed or canceled their appointments.

We are expecting the US economy to recover by 2010 after which the Indian economy is expected to witness a up-turn. To cope with the demands in the up-trend, we are planning to increase the number of our centers to 40 in a period of three to four years, including in tier-2 cities.