College placement sees a positive outlook this year

Chennai: Campus placement has started on a positive note this year as several big companies are expected to recruit more students with increased pay packets. The salary offered to students has also seen a 10 per cent hike this year.

According to Mr I. Philip Praveen, director, (Training and Placement) at Rajalakshmi Engineering College (REC) in the city, around the same time last year, bulk recruitment had not begun, but this year the college had a good start with an increase of 25 per cent hiring by big recruiters. TCS placed 611 students from REC this year whereas the company recruited 490, which shows an increase of over 100 students.

“Core manufacturing companies have also been aggressive in selecting good talent from our college. We also see a surge in product based companies wanting to visit campuses. There is a 300 per cent increase in hiring by these companies,” he said.

Another interesting feature this year, according to Mr Philip is, companies involved in emerging technologies like Big Data and Analytics want to hire more students who show skill sets in these areas.

It may be recalled that Nasscom president R. Chandrashekhar had announced during the recent HR Summit that there would be a six per cent growth in employee hiring this year, which would be in addition to its current strength of 3.5 million employees in the IT sector.

Listing emerging trends in campus placement, Prof K.K.Sivagnana Prabhu, head (training and corporate affairs) at RMK Engineering College said that companies have come up with differential salary based on student’s talent and the preference for internship based hiring too has increased.

“In the past students irrespective of their branch will work in a project, but now companies are offering projects in the student’s area of specialisation. For example, a mechanical student will join an automobile engineering based project in the IT firm,” he said.

Asked about this year’s recruitment scenario, Regional director of Nasscom K. Purushot haman said that apart from large service organisations a lot of product based companies have started getting into campuses for recruitment.

Adding that new age and startups have started recruiting in large numbers from campuses, Prof S. Ganapathy, dean (placement) at SRM University said that the salary offered by these companies too have gone up significantly. “If a startup had offered Rs.4 lakh as salary per annum, now they are ready to pay '5 lakhs, which is a positive trend,” he added.