Telangana: Engineering students worried as IT firms defer joining dates
Hyderabad: Mass lay-offs and downsizing by IT companies is likely to impact scores of final year engineering students recruited in campus placement drives in the last few months.
Some of the IT service companies have deferred the joining dates of students by nearly six months and the same was communicated to placement officers in colleges to pass on the information to students. Other companies are likely to follow suit.
It may be mentioned here that IT majors like Wipro, Cognizant, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Capgemini are facing their own share of challenges, and are moving to either prune or re-skill their respective workforce in view of the changed scenario over the last few months.
Usually, selected students in various engineering colleges are told to report for duty from the end of June or July first week. This is not going to happen for students selected by IT service companies. They may have to wait for at least six months or maybe longer than that. The same fate beckons for meritorious students not only from private colleges, but also from government engineering colleges.
They are obviously concerned. T.Shashank, who got selected from JNTU-Hyderabad, said they are a bit worried with the fresh developments taking place in the IT sector.
“There are two worries for selected students -- lack of clarity about the joining date and also whether one year of their career gets wasted if companies stretch their joining date beyond December,” he said.
Some students are requesting IT firms to allow students to join phase-wise from July onwards and then put them on orientation courses to brush up their skills as per industry requirement.
Aurora Group of Colleges Chairman Dr Ramesh Nimmatoori stated that they are keeping students in the loop, whatever the communication received from the industry.
“Two leading IT service companies recruited nearly 300 students from our college and they communicated about deferring the joining date until December. We informed the same to students and their parents,” he said.
However, meritorious students selected by IT product companies like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM should not have many concerns because they can expect joining from July first week.
“If we take a hundred meritorious students in a college, IT service companies recruit nearly seventy to eighty students and the annual pay package will be between Rs 3.5 and Rs 4 lakh, However IT product companies recruit in relatively smaller numbers, but the average pay is high, Rs 7 to Rs 9 lakh per annum," stated M. Ayesha, an engineering graduate who joined a job in an IT product company in June last year after getting selected in campus recruitment.
