The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.
January - 2007 - issue > Editor's Desk
The New Divide
Pradeep Shankar
In the last few years, the number of organizations wanting to hire on campus has grown manifold. Talking to a cross-section of HR managers you will know that they have grand plans for more on-campus hiring this year. This is a good time for college graduates.
With the job-hopping and high attrition menace, companies are soon realizing that it is much better off to hire from campus. By infusing fresh grads into the organizational setup, companies hope to maintain their salary budgets and also retain them for a longer time. To get the fresh grads to a productive stage at the earliest, tech companies across India are investing heavily on training.
On the surface, the campus hiring phenomenon looks rosy. Underneath this placement hype, the reality is quite different. Most of the 300,000 engineers who graduate each year in India’s 1058 colleges receive poor training, lacking useful job skills. As our cover story unwraps, there is a larger section of the engineering grads that are left company-less. In a country, which was once divided over the caste system, a different divide is taking roots: division based on skills.
Unlike the caste divide, the new divide is likely to be bridged much faster. There is a reason to believe so. Ever since the new age companies have started to visit campuses, there is a noticeable change in the industry-academia interactions. In some cases, companies have sponsored research activities in the institutes thereby enhancing the technical vigor within the academic setup. In several other cases, companies are partnering with the academic institutes to provide higher education to their employees—either through distant education or on campus.
Going by the Silicon Valley phenomenon, such collaborations will evolve to a stage where the technical caliber of the graduating engineers will be much higher than what it is today. Today’s Unwanted Tech Kids will be tomorrow’s most sought after Tech’s Own Kids.
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