Engineering colleges now look beyond IT firms for placements
Weak earnings and visa curbs have forced technology firms to go easy on campus hiring, prompting engineering colleges to consider reducing seats in some streams with low recruitments, placement officials from at least three campuses said.
With fewer technology companies coming to campuses, placement cells have invited non-IT (information technology) companies as well this year, the officials mentioned above said, on condition of anonymity.
“I think the days of hiring thousands of students from one campus is gone,” said a placement official from one of the top engineering colleges in Chennai, one of the three officials mentioned above. “All companies have reduced their hiring by 15-20%. There is 30-40% drop in placements this year. While Brexit is one thing, automation and (concerns over) H-1B visa is adding to the lack of jobs.”
Greater use of artificial intelligence and cloud computing have challenged the business model of India’s IT companies. At the same time, by increasing minimum salary requirements, the US is planning to squeeze the inflow of H-1B visa holders, who are mostly sent to work there by leading IT companies such as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), Infosys Ltd and Wipro Ltd.
SRM University, which has three campuses in Chennai and one in Delhi, claims it had placed a total of 6,064 students with technology companies last year.
According to Sriram Padmanabhan, director, career services, SRM University, the big four IT companies continue to be the top recruiters. “Additionally, we have been working hard to reach out to newer companies including IT, IT product and core engineering companies. We already have 50% more companies visiting our campus for recruitment this year compared to the last.”
When asked about a possible reduction in seats, Padmanabhan said: “As regards the future, we fine-tune our strategy in line with the global situation, domestic market needs and economic developments after deliberations at the highest levels.”
India has around 6,400 engineering colleges and the poor performance of some of them has caught the attention of the technical education regulator, the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE).
“We have started a new clause that if any engineering branch or stream in an institute does not have more than 30% admission consistently for five years, we would be shutting down those colleges. From the next academic year, we will ask the colleges to close down,” said Anil Sahasrabudhe, chairman, AICTE.
TCS and Capgemini declined to comment when asked if they had reduced hiring.
In an emailed response, Infosys said: “The hiring numbers in India continue to be in the same range as compared to previous years.”
G Balasubramanian, chief placement officer, (India and Dubai) Birla Institute of Technology (Pilani) University, said though the institute is not dependent on the services companies for placing its students, it has not seen any major drop. “However, the number of selection from these software companies have been little less than last year. So it’s definitely a trend that we see. The number of (software) companies that come to our campus has dropped a bit to the tune of 5-6%,” he added.
Tata Steel UK has signed a 100-million-pound ($126-million) deal to sell its speciality steel business to Liberty House Group, part of Tata Steel Ltd’s drive to restructure its European operations.
The deal, which is subject to regulatory clearances, secures 1,700 jobs, mostly in South Yorkshire in the north of England, Britain’s largest steelmaker said in a statement on Thursday.
The speciality division is one of the world’s biggest suppliers for the aerospace industry, with customers including RollsRoyce, Boeing and Airbus.
“This is an important step forward in securing a future for the (speciality) business. Today’s news also marks another important step forward in realising a more sustainable future for our Port Talbot-based supply chain in the UK,” said Bimlendra Jha, chief executive of Tata Steel UK.
On completion of the deal, Tata Steel will employ some 9,000 people in Britain, around half of them based in Port Talbot, Wales, home to Britain’s largest steelmaking plant.
Tata Steel Ltd is in talks to merge its European operations, including its remaining UK businesses, with Germany’s Thyssenkrupp. The success of the talks hinge on Tata getting regulatory approval to spin off its 15-billionpound pension scheme into a standalone entity, because Thyssenkrupp will not take on the UK unit’s pension liabilities in the event of a merger.
Tata Steel said it was seeking to develop a “structural solution for its UK pension scheme in the coming months”, and it was also consulting employees on how to secure a sustainable future for its remaining UK business.
The steel maker’s UK employees have been balloted on closing the pension scheme to future accrual, with vote results due this month. It is the first step towards separation of a scheme that has 130,000 members.
Liberty House, part of the Gupta Family Group, expressed interest in buying all of Tata Steel UK last year, before Tata Steel decided against a sale of the whole business in order to pursue a tie-up with Thyssenkrupp.