Employability of MBA graduates at dismal low: Report

Employability of MBA graduates across specialisations is at a dismal low, says the National Employability Report MBA Graduates, Annual Report 2012 by Aspiring Minds. While employability is below 10% for functional role in the field of HR, marketing or finance, in business consulting roles, it is as low as 2.5%. The study also revealed that a higher percentage of females are employable in HR roles and that 40% of employable talent lies beyond the top 1000 MBA colleges.

The report on the graduate class of 2011 covering data of 32,000 students from 220-plus MBA schools has been done using AMCAT, an employability test conducted by Aspiring Minds. Employability of MBAs was lowest in business consulting, followed by analyst and functional roles.

“The low employability figures show that management students and colleges need personalised employability feedback and guidance to take the right corrective steps. This shall not only lead to more students getting jobs, but also addressing the large talent needs of our growing industry,” said Varun Aggarwal, COO and CTO, Aspiring Minds in a release.

Management education has witnessed a mushrooming growth in India from just about 200 MBA colleges in the early nineties to around 3300 MBA colleges today. However, employability for management students ranges between 10 20% for roles involving sales and client servicing.

Employability of MBA graduates is exceptionally low (2.52%) in business consulting whereas it is just 7.98% for the analyst function. Great English and cognitive skills are required for these roles. The report found that employability in corporate (B2B) sales (10.56%) is almost half of that in consumer (B2C) sales (21.72%). The employability for customer service roles is 16.01%. In these roles, behavioral and personality aspects of the candidates play an indispensible role.

While marketing records the lowest employability at around 6.99%, BFSI (7.69%) and HR jobs (9.63%) follow closely. Only 7.69% MBA-finance students are employable in the BFSI sector, which has created a very large number of jobs in the last decade. The employability in the area of Operations is 15.04%, which is nearly half of that in the ITeS/BPO sector.

Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), October 15, 2012

225 B-schools, 52 engineering colleges close in 2 years

When the sun of the new millennium came up, shining on the aspirations of a young India, it marked the golden age for professional education. In the early part of the last decade, hundreds of new institutes came up and thousands of aspirants queued up to join them. That was a time when the country added up to 100,000 seats to its professional colleges every year.

A decade later, the picture is one of stark contrast in technical professional colleges: Since 2011, 225 B-schools and over 50 engineering colleges across India have downed shutters. Many more colleges have trimmed programmes, branches of engineering or streams in the management course. On the academic floor, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme was once supreme. Arrogantly and unambiguously, it became the final sign-off to schooling, attracting not only those interested in business but also those who wanted to master the tools of management.

Now, for the first time, overall growth of MBA education is negative in the books of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). In 2011-12, 146 new B-schools came up and 124 that were already running closed down. This year so far, 101 management colleges have closed down, only 82 have started. Similar is the story with the Master of Computer Application (MCA) course — 84 colleges stopped offering the programme this year; only 27 started MCA courses.

For students who choose not to apply to an MCA college, the decision is a no-brainer: with many more engineering seats available now, an undergraduate would rather earn a BTech degree followed by a two-year master’s than enrol for a bachelor’s in computer application and back it up with a three-year MCA that would also eat up six years.

Alive to the problem, the AICTE has decided to allow colleges to offer a five-year dual degree programme and also permit graduates of science, BSc (Computer Science) and BSc (Information Technology) to jump to the second year of the MCA course. Yet, the small positive growth in the sector is from the engineering colleges where new institutes are coming up faster than closures taking place, largely in Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab and Rajasthan.

AICTE Chairman S S Mantha said: “This is a turning phase for the professional education sector. Colleges in remote India and institutes of poor quality are not getting students. And for colleges, there is just one key to attracting students: institutes need to be top-of-the-line colleges. There is no payoff in running a bad college.”

Joining a professional college was once the pinnacle of an Indian student’s career for the seats were far outnumbered by aspirants. So students often happily chose anonymous professional colleges. But over time, they were put off by any of three reasons: poor quality of teaching, lack of adequate faculty or no job offer at the end. “A young graduate would rather take up a job or prepare harder for another shot at an entrance exam which is the gateway to a better college,” said a Director of one of the premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT).

The problem is also linked to the slowdown, said Samir Barua, Director, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). The job market has been tight for a couple of years. Earlier, many would give up a job to get an MBA and then re-enter the job market after pumping up their CV. “They are hesitant to take such a risk now. The pressure is being felt and applications for MBA are falling. But undergraduate programmes like engineering would not feel the same tension as everyone still at least wants their first college degree,” explained Barua.

Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), October 8, 2012

IT-ITeS firms tie up with institutes to create employable graduates

Tired of complaining about the employability of graduates in the country, individual IT-ITeS firms are now tying up with educational institutes to be able to hire more employable graduates. In the bargain, apart from faculty development and creation of desired curriculum there will be real-time work experience for students, at the campus level. “It is paramount for the industry to work closely with educational institutions to integrate market evolution with business curriculum,” said Mohit Thukral, senior vice-president and business leader, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, Genpact.

Genpect had yesterday signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur (IIM-U) to create a “knowledge partnership.” Under this seven-year agreement, IIM-U and Genpact will jointly develop a centre for asset-based lending and finance, and an analytics laboratory that will give students the opportunity to solve real-time problems, work on proprietary and industry software tools and technology as well as get hands on industry experience.

Genpact will offer summer internships to full-time students and set up a merit- based scholarship. Students who get the post-graduate diploma in management will be eligible for full-time employment at Genpact in its banking, analytics and finance businesses. Last week, Genpact entered into a tie-up with Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Ghaziabad, for training in analytics, one of the fastest growing segment for the industry. The company is also in talks with another institute that will create a curriculum and training for actuarial.

HCL Technologies is also working with education institutes to train students at the graduate level. The company had last year entered into a tie-up with Madras University, to hire graduate students (non-technical) with basic skills set for its call centre operations. “Last year, we hired close to 1,800 students. This was the first batch that we got on board after our tie-up with Madras University. The best experience from this tie-up is that we have not seen any drastic surprises. In the past, students would suddenly decide to leave the training period. Now, we have 100 per cent retention, as students are aware of what they are getting into,” said Subrat Chakravarty, HR head of business services, HCL Technologies.

HCL Technologies has now gone ahead and entered a similar tie-up with Bharathiar University, Chennai. The company has also constructed a facility within the university that allows it to train students and interact with the faculty. Chakravarty shares that such tie-ups are necessary for the students as they are not aware of the business environment. “It is very important to have a career dialogue. Students at this juncture are very confused, as they enter the job market,” he said.

With the current education system falling short of addressing the employability factor of engineering and non-technical graduates, the IT and ITeS industry has taken onto itself to address this problem. “Our idea is to create a skillset base in some of the niche upcoming business areas. We expect to be able to hire at least 20-25 per cent of the base of students who take up these courses,” said Thukral.

The need to tie-up with educational institutes is also arising from the fact that the industry is maturing and needs skillsets that are caters to upcoming technology areas like cloud, capital market in finance, analytics and others. Take the case of technology solutions firm Sapient. The firms finance and commodity business unit Sapient Global Markets, have set up a Global Market Institute that trains students in capital markets. “We do hire engineers but though they have all the technical knowledge they are not aware of how the capital markets works, especially the Wall Street. It is difficult to find talent in India in capital market. From 2008-09 onwards we created and ran a programme that catered to this segment. This programme runs for four to six months and involves, classroom training, and real-time engagement in projects,” said Abhishek Bhattacharya, Director, Sapient Global Markets. Every year the company trains 300 people through this institute, for which it also flies in people from the US.

Source: Business Standard, August 30, 2012

Academic factories in India churn thousands of engineers, barely 10% worth employing

Ashish got thrown out of the interview when he was shown a Vernier calliper and he called it a screw gauge. A mid-sized company had come to his engineering college in Bhopal to recruit fresh graduates. But the interview began on a bad note. Realisation soon dawned on Ashish that his four years in the college and the lakhs his family had spent on his education had been a total waste. Not the one to be deterred, he used those years to good advantage when film maker Prakash Jha came to the city to shoot for Aarakshan: Ashish brought in the extras — students from his college.

In one of the several engineering colleges that have come up in the outskirts of Chennai, Sentahmizh studies mechanical engineering. He hails from Ariyalur, a small town in southern Tamil Nadu, and admits that he doesn’t understand a word of what his teachers say, learns by rote and studies just enough to pass. He can’t speak English. The college, when he was seeking admission, had spun fantastic tales about multinational corporations falling over each other to recruit its students. Sentahmizh suspects that might never happen. He may soon join the ranks of unemployed engineers.

Carlos Ghosn may have marvelled at India’s frugal engineering skills, the fact is that a vast majority of the country’s engineering graduates are unemployable. Many engineering colleges are just churning out deadwood. Aspiring Minds, a company that works in the field of human resources, last year surveyed 55,000 students who had graduated in 2011; it found that just 17.45 per cent were directly employable in the information technology sector, the biggest recruiter of engineers these days, without any training.

When it came to direct deployment on projects, the number fell sharply to 3.51 per cent. And in IT product companies, which require higher skill sets, it slid further to 2.68 per cent. A few days ago, PurpleLeap, a Pearson and Educomp company, released the findings of its survey of 34,000 students from 198 engineering colleges across the country: only one out of ten graduates from Tier 2, 3 and 4 colleges is readily employable, and one-third are unemployable even after training. The survey, mind you, was restricted to students who had done well academically.

The tab for the poor output has to be picked up by the employers. IT companies, according to analysis done by NASSCOM and Evalueserve, spend $1.2 billion every year on training. Had the engineering schools done their job properly, this money would go straight to their bottom-line. If you have invested in IT stocks, this should worry you. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest provider of IT services, spends 2 per cent of its turnover ($10 billion in 2011-12) on training. It is now investing Rs 10 billion in a training facility for 15,000 people in Thiruvananthapuram. Infosys’s Mysore campus has trained 100,000 fresh graduates so far, at a cost of $6,000-7,000 per employee. That’s a whopping $600-700 million knocked out of the company’s profits over ten years. Incidentally, the campus started with a module of 14 weeks which got extended to 17 weeks and now stands at 23 weeks. “There is definitely a gap between what they study in college and the skills they need at work,” says Infosys Senior Vice-president & Group Head (Education & Research) Srikantan Moorthy.

There are 1.5 million engineering seats in India today, up from 500,000 five years ago. This is way beyond the demand for engineers. Himanshu Aggarwal, the CEO and co-founder of Aspiring Minds, says that the IT sector absorbs around 200,000 engineers in a year, and the demand from the other sectors can’t add up to more than that. If one-fifth seats go unfilled in engineering colleges, that leaves 800,000 jobless engineers in a year. But all of them may not join the ranks of the unemployed as many get enrolled in business schools. That’s another Pandora’s Box: there are over 3,000 of them in the country, many not more than holes in the wall. Some others take non-engineering jobs.

Shantanu Prakash, Managing Director of Educomp Solutions, says that there was a shortage of engineers in the country a few years back and that precipitated a mad scramble amongst businessmen, big and small, to set up engineering colleges. “And now, all of a sudden, there is a glut,” he says. From almost zero a few years ago, private colleges own almost 92 per cent of the engineering seats in the country — such has been the rush. There are 35 colleges in Bhopal alone. In Madhya Pradesh, there are 200 engineering colleges with over 100,000 seats on offer. The state that has seen maximum growth is Andhra Pradesh — it has 671 private colleges that offer 320,000 seats.

Engineering education is regulated by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). It has a fairly stringent check list that all engineering colleges need to fulfill: not less than 2.5 acres of land, not more than 300 students per acre, corpus of at least Rs. 10 million for operational expenses, student-teacher ratio of not more than 15, student-personal-computer ratio of at least 4, etc. But that’s hardly proved a deterrent. Setting up an engineering college can cost upwards of Rs. 150 million, depending on real estate prices, and payback happens in seven years. On the other hand, the demand will never see a slowdown. Indian parents, it is universally acknowledged, never flinch before spending large sums of money on their children’s education. Higher education in India is immensely valued. That explains the glut.

And it’s severe. Of the 320,000 seats in Andhra Pradesh, says an education consultant based in Hyderabad, more than 120,000 will go vacant this year. In Maharashtra, 30,000 of the 110,000 seats on offer went vacant last year; this year, the number is expected to climb to 40,000. Some colleges have appointed touts to get students. Business Standard contacted two such agents, one in Ghaziabad and one in Mumbai, to secure admission in some reputed engineering colleges in Delhi and Pune. The admission was guaranteed, albeit at the cost of a few hundred thousand rupees. Some engineering schools are ready to shut down and cut their losses, and quite a few are up for sale. Though AICTE reduced the minimum marks required in Class XII, to be eligible for admission in an engineering college, from 50 per cent to 45 per cent in 2010-11, it hasn’t helped — there are no takers for a large number of seats. Moved obviously by the plight of these colleges, the Maharashtra government wrote to AICTE earlier this year not to approve any new college in the state. Still, AICTE has given its nod to 11 new engineering colleges!

AICTE is actually in no mood to relent. Shankar S. Mantha, its chairman, is convinced the country needs more engineering colleges. “Given the low gross enrolment ratio of India (18-20 per cent), there is a need to make available more higher education opportunities for this huge chunk of students who remain outside the system,” says he. It is only two years later that the council will revisit the issue — that’s how long it takes to build an engineering college — when the colleges approved now will be up and running. Besides, says he, some redundancy needs to be built into the capacity as some streams lose favour and others gains currency. Mantha is convinced that engineering colleges will run out of seats once Indian students who go abroad to study prefer to do so in India. “Even in the US, the top six or seven management institutes are all full; but in some of the better institutes, around 50 per cent of the seats are vacant. I expect in another year or so the entire sector will undergo a sea change and you will find more institutes will be needed,” he says.

In the bargain, the quality has hit rock bottom. The Aspiring Minds employability study had found that states with fewer engineering colleges produced more employable engineers. There is therefore an inverse correlation between quantity and quality. Prakash of Educomp says that it is a highly regulated sector where colleges often cut corners to stay afloat. AICTE fixes the admission norms, the fees that colleges can charge and the salaries they can pay their teachers. “It’s a business where the input costs as well as the output costs are controlled,” says Prakash who runs an engineering college in Greater Noida.

As a result, the infrastructure of many new colleges is poor and the faculty inexperienced. Worse, everybody involved seems to acknowledge it. “Do they (the new engineering colleges) have trained and skilled faculty to teach modern courses,” Madhya Pradesh’s director of technical education, Arun Nahar, asks. Several schools have hired those former students as teachers who failed to get jobs outside. Badam Singh Yadav, who runs the IES Colllege of Technology in Bhopal, says most of his time is spent grappling with government rules and solving the “petty” issues of his students. “Does anybody care,” he says with fair bit of irritation, “that most of our students come from a rural background?” Engineering students in Chennai say the teachers often lack the motivation to help them out.

Apart from technical knowledge, most graduates are woefully short on soft skills. Wipro, says Senior Vice-president & Global Head (Workforce Planning & Development) Deepak Jain, runs a 12-week course for fresh graduates to upgrade their technical as well as soft skills. Ajoy Mukherjee, the global head of human resources at TCS, finds that engineering graduates lack soft skills such as the ability to work in a team and communicate effectively more than technical knowledge. The company’s three-month training programme, which every recruit has to undergo, looks to address these gaps, and focuses on converting students to professionals, says Mukherjee. “The inability to communicate is a serious concern, especially not being able to talk in English, form grammatically correct sentences, etc. When 94 per cent of your revenue comes from overseas, it is essential that you know how to communicate in English,” he says.

A recent report by Aspiring Minds, based on a study of 55,000 students from 250 engineering colleges, said 25-35 per cent students are unable to comprehend English. That shouldn’t have been a problem, except that most books and instruction manuals are in English. Only 57 per cent can write grammatically correct sentences in English, less than 48 per cent understand “moderately sophisticated” words, and almost 50 per cent possess grammar skills no better than a Class VII student. Not more than 30 per cent of the students, who go through stress and exhaustion while preparing for engineering college, are acquainted with the word “exhaust”. “Absurd” is a word not understood by 50 per cent. It’s a mess out there.

Source: Business Standard, August 4, 2012

Online portals helping students in getting dream internships

Swapnil Khetan, a third-year student at Sardar Patel Institute of Technology here, wanted a medium to connect with top companies to secure an internship and was finding it difficult. That is when he stumbled upon www.Letsintern.com. In the two years of his association with the portal, he has done internships with Philip Morris, Channel V and the Zee Group. Several college students are opting to engage with online portals that help get them internships with companies. Portals such as www.Letsintern.com, www.Hellointern.com, www.Twenty19.com and www.letmeknow.in have come in to fill the gap between companies’ expectations and students’ needs.

“In India, according to various reports, 75-90 per cent of our graduates lack employability skills. These are best learnt on the job and our endeavour is to promote the internship culture in India by making it easier, accessible and covering a larger cross-section of job profiles,” says Rishabh, CEO and co-founder of www.Letsintern.com.

For the founders of www.HelloIntern.com, the idea was conceived out of the personal experiences of the founders when they were in pursuit of internship opportunities as students. They found getting a good opportunity was, in most cases, pivotal on the single question of, “Do you have a contact in the company you are going to apply?” The portal, founded six years earlier, now has a little more than 35,000 students registered on its website. Snehal N, co-founder of www.HelloIntern.com, says the students are mainly from engineering and MBA institutes. Daily, he said, the portal got five companies looking actively for interns. Students can upload their resume and apply for positions directly through the portal, without paying anything. Companies can glance at these profiles or search through the database, also for free. Also offered is a premium service called InternExpress, where they charge companies for complete intern recruitment solutions. About 1,600 companies, of which 75 per cent are start-ups, have recruited interns via HelloIntern.

Karthikeyan Vijayakumar, founder and CEO at www.Twenty19.com, would help students on an informal basis to get internships, in his initial days. He later launched a portal to streamline this process.It helps companies screen the appropriate candidate for their requirements. “Companies post their requirements on the portal and also have a quiz challenge tool at their disposal. Through this tool, the companies post the requirements, with some questions for prospective candidates. It becomes easier to select candidates on the basis of the answers they’ve provided to the questions. Here, too, it is free for students. Companies pay an annual fee for posting.

There are others, like www.letmeknow.in, which offer more services than internship. The portal offers internship opportunities, information about college events and scholarships, among others. It charges a fee for premium services for companies, but is free for students. Ankur Kumar, CEO, said the portal had 75 college ambassadors and had conducted orientation sessions across colleges in India. It has a 25,000-user base and gets the highest traffic from tier-2/3 college students, with no internship opportunities at college.

Demand
Students and companies have their own reasons for using the portals as a medium. Arnav Choudhury, a third-year student at Bharatiya Vidyapeeth University College of Engineering, Pune, said his reason for choosing www.Twenty19.com was the huge scope in terms of the number of companies advertising on it. He is pursuing an internship with Aspirare Ventures, a start-up dealing with corporate training assessment and offering marketing/sales solutions. Another student, Sanyam Agarwal, in his third year at Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior, wanted an internship in the mobile application segment and got it through www.Twenty19.com. He chose the portal because it offered more options than offline modes.

Young organisations like Social Heart, a portal hosting creations from non-government organisations and artists, found it convenient to source talent from a www.Twenty19.com rather than physically visiting a college. Similarly, Vinay C, CEO of WebSide, a platform involved in digital and social media marketing, found it easier and faster to choose candidates through the screening procedure at Twenty19.com. Soaib Grewal, co-founder of Waterwalla, has almost outsourced all its internship requirements to this portal. “We are a small organisation. It doesn’t make sense for us to go to colleges for internship requirements,” said Grewal. Waterwalla is a not-for-profit organisation, working for clean water in urban slums.

On an overall basis, the portals are seeing year-on-year growth of 80 to 100 per cent in the number of users.”When we started, people said the entire industry is very small and we would barely survive. Not only did we survive and scale up profitably to a 20-people team across three offices, many other smaller players have emerged in the last two years and everyone’s been surviving and collectively growing the market,” explained Rishabh.

While some are looking to add more students and companies to their list, while others like www.HelloIntern.com are looking to consolidate the business. “We feel the sector itself is not that attractive to build a large and scalable business like, say, Naukri or Monster, but it can be an excellent add-on to a recruitment portal and other student-focused services, as it will help them lower user-acquisition costs and also get a competitive edge. HelloIntern is actively looking for this consolidation and to become a part of an organisation which shares the same vision as ours,” said Snehal.

Source: Business Standard, June 11, 2012

E-tailers go on a hiring spree

Slowdown or not, Internet penetration in India has paved the way for online retailers’ growth. To supplement this growth, the industry is looking for the best talent too. According to Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham), India’s e-retail industry is likely to touch Rs. 70 billion by 2015, up from Rs. 20 billion currently. Going forward, the industry expects the e-commerce market to grow at 50 to 100 per cent.

“E-commerce is a booming space as the Internet audience is likely to double in the next two to three years. This industry will require talent from various sectors such as technology, product, analytics, sourcing, general management talent, merchandising and marketing,” said Ms Pearl Uppal, Co-founder and Chief executive Officer (CEO) of Fashionandyou.com. Ms Uppal said her company is expecting to triple in size this year. The company, which has staff strength of 800 people, plans to hire more than 400 people this fiscal year and will be seeking out candidates from Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).

Yebhi.com is likely to add 2,000 people to its staff strength. Last year the online retailer added 1,000 people. Further, the company, which posted revenues of Rs. 1.25 billion last fiscal, is looking at 300-400 per cent growth in this year. “To support this growth we need much larger teams and, therefore, the team size will also grow by about 200 per cent. We are also looking to expand our back-end capability significantly,” said Mr Agarwal, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of bigshoebazaar.com, the brand owner of Yebhi.com. The company plans to add a new fulfilment centre spread over 500,000 sq ft this fiscal, scaling up from 100,000 sq ft currently. It says it is likely to invest about $100 million over the next five years.

Mr Gaurav Gupta, Director, Deloitte India, said, “E-commerce is one of the booming sectors. Some of these players have private equity investments. Their focus is on building up their infrastructure back-end, customer acquisition, product acquisition, supply chain and others. The growth in this segment is phenomenal because of a small base and they are hiring in large numbers.”

Ms Anupama Beri, Head of human resources at Snapdeal.com, said the company is aiming at a growth of 300-400 per cent. “Immediate requirement is between 150-200 people in the next month to month-and-a-half,” she said. The company, which was launched in February 2010, has grown from 100-people strong company in October 2010 to 1,500 currently.

Source: The Hindu Business Line, June 6, 2012

Graduates from top B-schools, IITs make a beeline for e-tailing companies

Raj Kuruhuri, 24, has been working for e-commerce start-up BuyThePrice.com for over a month now. Kuruhuri, who graduated from Indian Institute of Management (IIM)-Indore this year, opted to join the online deals site that started only in late 2010, rejecting offers from major technology players. The meteoric rise of the e-commerce segment in the last one year is driving sharp minds from the country’s premier B-schools and engineering colleges to be a part of the sunrise industry.

This year, Snapdeal made over 20 offers across IIMs and 75 at IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), e-tailer of books and electronics Flipkart hired 120 graduates from IITs and 23 from IIMs and other top B-schools. Online fashion store Myntra hired seven IIT graduates, five from Indian School of Business (ISB), and two from the IIMs this year. Naaptol, which was among the first-timers at the IIM campuses this year, made 15 offers across leading management schools, including Narsee Moonjee and ISB, all of which were accepted.

Industry experts point out that it is the prospect of bigger responsibilities and faster growth that are driving the graduates to look for opportunities in the e-commerce space. “I was looking at various sunrise sectors, but I was particularly interested in e-commerce because of the pace at which it is growing. What worried me about joining an established firm, is that I feared getting lost amongst 150,000 other employees, without ever knowing what my work was actually amounting to,” says Kuruhuri. In his one-month stint with BuyThePrice, Kuruhuri has laid his hands across departments, including sales, operations, promotions and category development. “This in a big firm would be unimaginable. Also, the people you work with drive a lot of passion into you, because their lives are built around their organisations,” he says.

This year, of the total 423 offers at IIM-Bangalore, 4% were from the e-commerce firms. The first-timers among the e-commerce companies this year at IIM campuses include RedBus, Valyoo Technologies, Via, and Naaptol. “We went to the IIMs for the first time this year. A total of 15 offers were made across the top-tier B-schools, all of which were accepted. Average salaries for IIM grads was R12 lakh, others were R6-9 lakh. We hired 10 IIT graduates with a package of about Rs. 600,000-900,000 as well,” says Naaptol.com e-commerce head Sachin Singhal. The company has a staff strength of 1,500 and is adding 70 people every month.

According to an IIM-B report, the e-commerce sector this year was represented by Flipkart, InfoEdge, Snapdeal and Amazon. Flipkart recruited six students offering senior manager profile in sales and marketing, and supply chain. Companies feel that there aren’t many experienced people in the e-commerce space yet, and supply and demand are not proportionate. “The obvious place to look for is these colleges, where they may not be experienced in the field, but are definitely bright enough to work in it,” adds Sachin.

Recruiters point out that the age profile of the candidates from top B-schools are between 25-30 years and they look for jobs that offer areas to explore. They have a huge appetite for learning and start-ups give them that opportunity. Notwithstanding the global recessionary trends, 2011 witnessed a resurgence of the e-commerce sector. The largest investments in the space till date came last year when Snapdeal.com raised $40 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and Fashionandyou.com raised $40 million from a group of investors led by Norwest Venture Partners and Intel Capital. In all, in 2011, this space saw 32 investments.

“In the last one year, the sector was successful in attracting a lot of funding from major VC/PE players that equipped the e-commerce players to pay heavy cheques to get talents from top management and engineering institutes. Money, and at the same time chance to do something new and exciting attracts these candidates,” said Sangeeta Lala, Senior Vice-President (Sourcing), of staffing company TeamLease Services.

Average salary offered by an e-commerce company to an IIM graduate varies between Rs. 1.2-1.5 million. While at IITs it is between Rs.700,000-1 million. “Salaries for tech and management freshers have been in the range of Rs. 1.2-1.5 million annually plus ESOPs and other benefits. For laterals, compensation was adjusted accordingly. At ISB it was in the range of Rs. 2-2.5 million because of lateral hires,” says Myntra.

“This year, we have made about 20 offers across IIMs and 75 in IITs. We have hired from top-tier schools for functions across marketing, sales, operations, product management, and vendor management. This year for the first time we visited IIM campuses,” said head of marketing at Snapdeal.com Sandeep Komaravelley. Snapdeal, which currently has 1,200 people, started its operations in February 2010.

However, some are of the opinion that it is not always that start-ups can match the offers of other big players but try to match them with benefits like ESOPs. “Start-ups can’t always match salaries quoted by the biggies, but we do tend to make up with perks like ESOPs. This has more to do than providing a monetary value. It instills a sense of entitlement, and ownership, and in many ways makes people want to do better,” says Buytheprice.com founder and CEO Ranjith Boyanapalli. The firm made two offers in IIM, Indore and Ahmedabad this year and both were accepted. Operational for two years now, the company currently has about 70 employees.

Source: The Financial Express, April 24, 2012

Soon, AICTE to launch job portal, academic website

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) will soon launch a first of its kind academic networking site, along with an in-house job portal and a repository of doctorate papers to check duplication and cheating. The academic networking site proposes to interconnect 7.5 million students enrolled across AICTE-approved institutions linked through email IDs. The yet to be christened networking site proposes to rope in faculty and industry stakeholders on to its database.

“The idea is to encourage academic networking and facilitate peer learning. That faculty will be accessible on this network, and help with course material, share charts, diagrams, data and projects that can aid learning, will make this an altogether knowledge building mechanism,” said the Chairman of AICTE, S S Mantha.

The AICTE is also readying Project Factory, a repository aimed at capturing abstracts of all post graduate projects in an online bank. These abstracts of research work will be available to industry stakeholders and research labs so that those interested can easily contact the student concerned and take it forward. “It will also help us check large-scale cheating and cut-copy-paste jobs that are seen in a number of research papers. A search engine on Project Factory will be able to quickly throw up abstracts of research works of interest to anyone,” Mantha added.

The AICTE e-governance project envisages an employment portal that proposes to store every student’s semester-wise results online and link it with his CV. This CV will automatically be forwarded to industry HRD heads whenever there is a vacancy suited to the student. This central database will link up with an industry database of 8,000 stakeholders and help facilitate the placement process.

On Thursday, the AICTE launched Live@edu — a hosted communication and collaboration service based on cloud computing — with Microsoft. Live@edu is a cloud suite that will offer email with a 10GB inbox, Microsoft Office Web applications, 25 GB of additional file storage, document sharing, video chat, mobile email and instant messaging to AICTE’s over seven million students and 500,000 faculty members.

Source: The Indian Express, April 16, 2012

Making graduates more ‘employable’

Despite millions of college graduates joining the workforce every year, less than a quarter of them are seen as ’employable’ by industry. Some entrepreneurs have sensed a business opportunity in this dreary situation. Ventures which test and highlight the employable skills of graduates, rather than mere scholastic aptitude, are coming up. These companies have introduced external testing services, which also serve to give students an insight into their strengths and weaknesses. Recruiters tap this database and select students with the required skill-sets from a larger pool than they could access earlier, helping more graduates bag jobs, these ventures say.

Co-founders of Common Job Test (CJT) Mr Prashant Pitti and Mr Govind Wakhlu say the aim is to remove the bias against students from lesser-known colleges and smaller cities. Mr Wakhlu, alumnus of Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, said, “Candidates are still judged on the basis of which colleges they go to. But college scores are not an indicator of how good an employee he or she will be.”

This is why they test students on other grounds such as business aptitude, language proficiency and people skills and the scores can be accessed by recruiters. Mr Pitti, who studied in IIT-Madras, said that this system results in higher conversion rates, besides making the recruitment process more financially viable for companies. He said students from over 750 colleges have already taken their test. CJT was started in September 2011. Their clientele includes Godrej & Boyce, Matrix Telecom and Business Wire India.

Aspiring Minds, started by MIT alumnus Mr Varun Aggarwal and IIT-Delhi graduate Mr Himanshu Aggarwal in 2008, also conducts similar standardised tests, following which students are given a detailed report on skills. Top companies such as HCL Technologies, MphasiS and Tata Motors among others use Aspiring Minds test scores to recruit freshers. Over 30,000 students take the test every month.

Employment Exchanges in colleges
Further, the company is setting up Employment Exchanges in colleges, which is likely to further expand their reach. These companies are aggressively targeting Tier-II and -III cities as well as B and C-list colleges because of the huge number of students.

The National Employability Report for engineering graduates finds that the difference between employability of students from Tier-I and Tier-II cities is often narrow. Thus, smaller cities provide an equally large pool of talent as the metros.

Source: The Hindu Business Line, April 9, 2012

IT companies look beyond engineering graduates

An engineering degree is considered by many as the ticket to employment in the $69-billion information technology-information technology-enabled services (IT-ITeS) industry. But the reality is a bit different. With the IT-ITES industry looking for niche talent in testing and infrastructure management, which do not necessarily require engineering graduates, only 20% of the 900,000-odd engineering graduates every year are being recruited by the industry. The fresh graduates are also being attracted by the manufacturing and automotive sectors.

“It is a misconception that the IT industry employs most of the engineers that graduate each year. A significant number goes to sectors like manufacturing and automotive as well. It would be safe to say that close to 20% of the engineering graduates are absorbed by the industry. And 75-90% of the talent in the IT industry would have an engineering degree,” said NASSCOM President Som Mittal.

While 30% of the talent in the country comprises engineering graduates, 46% are non-engineering graduates and the rest are specialists like chartered accountants, CPAs, doctors, lawyers, PhDs and actuaries, who are in high demand from the IT industry. The trend, according to both NASSCOM and technology schools, is moving towards such niche talent as the industry is now offering complex and end-to-end services.

IIT-Madras was approached by 175 IT companies in 2011, whereas this year the number reduced to 138. Commenting on the number of engineers joining IT companies, an official from IIT-Kharagpur said: “This year five students from our computer science branch were placed in IT companies, against 26 in other/ non IT sectors. Around 15-20% of engineering students are being placed in the IT sector in the last few years.”

Analysts feel that the recent profiles that are novel in the IT industry necessarily do not need engineers and thus the matrix is changing. Today, the industry directly employs 2.77 million professionals of whom safely 60% are hardcore engineering graduates.

“Earlier IT companies hired close to 100% of their staff as engineers, now it has reached 90% and soon it will be 70% in the next two to five years. The BPO sector is emerging and there are new processes like testing and infrastructure management which necessarily do not need engineers,” said Zensar Technologies CEO Ganesh Natarajan. He added that most of these engineers, roughly around 400,000-450,000 of the 900,000, are not employable by the IT industry as well. Moreover, 20% of the engineering graduates also go for higher education every year. Thus, the IT-ITes sector has to choose from the residual. “Many graduates from other disciplines (such as mathematics and computing) also opted for IT profile offered by various organisations,” said a student from IIT-Guwahati where 37% of the placed students joined the IT sector, including organisations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Adobe and InMobi.

“Though the employability rate in the IT industry was 25% as per our study in 2005, we believe that the situation is better now because of initiatives by tech companies who have started their own certification programmes,” said NASSCOM senior vice-president Sangeeta Gupta.

An official from IIT-Kharagpur said: “Chunk of the students prefer consultancy and core jobs over IT jobs. IT sector is mostly confined to students from the IT department and few others from other departments.” The demand for consultancy jobs is very high. From the past few years, the trends show that students tend to drift away from IT jobs. Those who are interested in further studies, work in core sector for a few years and those interested in pursuing an MBA, go for the consultancy jobs, the official said.

Source: The Financial Express, February 24, 2012