Postgraduates in high demand at placements?
HIRING TRENDS Tech and finance firms rule the roost at placement sessions while computer engineering graduates remain in demand
The placement season at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) officially began last week. Placements will be held across phases at certain IITS with some concluding the first phase this week. For instance, phase I at IIT Madras concluded on 10 December with nearly 763 offers excluding the pre-placement offers.
The top five recruiters at IIT Madras were Citi with 25 offers, Intel India Technology Pvt Ltd (20), EXL Service (19), Flipkart.com (18) and HCL Technologies Ltd (17).
Similarly, at IIT Roorkee, over 600 offers were handed out to students during the first week of placements. Placements at IIT Roorkee saw an improvement with this year’s offer tally being 681 in the first phase compared to 562 offers at the end of the first week last year — a growth of 21% over last year.
More than 160 companies visited the campus so far for recruiting students and the number is expected to rise significantly in the coming week.
Thirteen international offers were made to students by Microsoft, Webstaff Co. Ltd. and Mercari. Nearly 33 start-up companies also participated in the placements during the first week.
At IIT Kharagpur, about 1,000 offers were made during the first phase of placements.
Interestingly, demand for postgraduates has also gone up. At IIT Madras, for instance, the number of postgraduate students who received placement offers has gone up to 49% at the end of day four this year (2017-18) from 39% at the same time last year (2016-17).
Similarly, the number of research scholars receiving offers also went up to 44% at the end of day four this year as compared to 25% same time last year.
Experts believe that this trend emerges from the demand for highly specialised talent with niche skills and is likely to continue.
According to G Srinivasaraghavan, Professor & Faculty-incharge, Internships & Placement at International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, a deemed university producing specialised postgraduates, placement scene will improve for those with a Master’s degree in a niche area as they are placed at the higher end of the IT skill-spectrum in areas such as research and development, architecture and Software Engineering in Analytics among other areas.
Agrees Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director, IIT Madras, said, “Postgraduate placements call for more creative matching of specialised job profiles to the knowledge and skills of candidates. Since IIT Madras now has many Master’s students graduating, this significant increase in placement of postgraduates so early in the season is heartening.”
He adds that this demonstrates that companies with high-end engineering and technology positions are looking to recruit its highly-qualified students.
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