Jobs galore at engineering colleges, pay offers up 15%; highest at Rs 39L

Tech institutes beat economic slowdown; salary packages up 10-15%

Despite a downturn, India's leading engineering colleges other than the IITs have found good final placements in top companies in India.

Both average and highest pay packages at campuses are up 10-15% from a year ago thanks to a surge in domestic offers. While there have been reports of the health of the Indian software services sector deteriorating and beginning to jolt the job market, this news comes as a major relief.

“Placements are very good compared to last year. Many companies are visiting for multiple profiles,”  RS Walia, training and placement head at Delhi Technological University told Economics Times.

Hiring is up 15%, said Walia, with companies including Amazon, Directi, PwC, L&T, Maruti Suzuki, Airtel and Samsung recruiting more this year. “We are also targeting a large number of first¬timers for the 2017¬18 session,” he said.

Let us take a look at campus placements of some of India's top-notch engineering institutes:

BITS Pilani University: Placements at the three campuses in Pilani, Goa and Hyderabad started in early August. Nearly 586 students were placed by the end of September, up from 546 a year ago. Qualcomm (50), Oracle (48) and Microsoft (38) have picked the maximum number of students so far at BITS Pilani University.

Highest offer: A cloud-computing software company Nutanix offered the highest salary package at Rs 39.48 lakh, up nearly 13% from last year.
 

Average Salary has gone up 10% to Rs 16.05 lakh.

NIT Warangal: Uber has made the highest offer so far at Rs 36 lakh, according to a report in Economic Times. Qualcomm has made the maximum number of offers at NIT Warangal, along with Amazon and Fidelity.

Delhi Technological University: Top package is Rs 39.12 lakh

NIT Trichy: More than 1,200 students are participating in the placement process this year. The average annual salary is hovering at around the Rs 8.5 lakh mark. Highest CTC package has jumped nearly 30% to Rs 36 lakh from last year’s Rs 28 lakh. Oracle, L&T, Qualcomm and Reliance Industries are among those making the maximum offers

Companies aboard absent in most cases

Due to the absence of major IT companies aboard, a lot of first-timers and domestic companies have taken the lead in the hiring spree.

“We have had a dozen first-timers till now. The endeavour is always to enlarge the portfolio of companies to have more niche jobs,” said NIT Trichy’s AK Bakthavatsalam, head of the department of training and placement. 

According to Bakthavatsalam, global cues were subdued last year and continue to be so this year as well due to visa issues and Brexit among other issues. “Overseas offers are fewer,” he said. RS Walia of DTU, however, said that international companies generally come their campus for placements October onward.

Relief for IITs

Some IT giants like Samsung, IBM, Oracle and Wipro may offer pay packages reaching up to Rs 20 lakhs during campus placements for Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IIT-D) students. 

About 40 companies have registered for the placement process with the esteemed engineering college during the pre-placement session, said a report by Gizmodo India.

The biggest of the industry players generally recruit candidates in the early sessions of the placement season to garner the best talents. While the IT firms will focus aggressively on hiring product developers, software engineers as well as product engineers with exceptional coding knowledge, management companies will also queue up to recruit data scientists. 

A number of startups including Zomato, Portea Medical, Hospscotch etc. were barred from the premier institute's placements in the year 2016 as they cancelled the offers made to students at a later stage. 

The ban has however been lifted now.

Trump policies, layoffs have made students fearful

Earlier this year, signs of trouble were visible when online forums were abuzz with speculation about the job market and impending crisis. In April and early May this year, online forums like Quora and Facebook groups, which receive queries from registered users, had questions that ranged from concern to calls of distress. Questions like“Is it true that Cognizant is planning a mass layoff in the upcoming months?”, “Why did Cognizant lay off 6,000 employees?” and “What is automation and how is it affecting the layoffs in the IT industry?” were posted on the website. 

Then there were those who were concerned about H-1B visas issued by the United States to Indian workers: “What are my options if I get laid off now and am on H1-B already?” “I was laid off on an H1B. How much time do I have?” On April 18, the American president Donald Trump had ordered a comprehensive review of the H-1B visa programme, the way by which American companies hire high-skilled foreign workers. The multi-agency review will be in line with Trump’s protectionist policy ‘to buy American and hire American’.

Last month, Associated Chambers of Commerce of India (ASSOCHAM), the apex trade body in the country, released a paper warning of severe impact on the jobs here. It said that the new norms will affect nearly 86 percent of the H-1B visas that are issued to Indian workers in the IT, scaling down the figure in the ‘computer space’ to ‘about 60 percent or even less’.