It's recruitment season and the final-year students of the National Institute of Engineering here have their hands full with attractive job offers. The Training & Placement Division of the NIE has registered an all-time high placement record in the campus recruitment drive for 2011-12.
G.L. Shekhar, principal, said the recruitment was still in progress and going by the response of the companies, the campus recruitment this season was likely to reach 100 per cent. Incidentally, the NIE Training & Placement Division, headed by H.S. Prasanna, is itself an ISO-certified unit in view of its recruitment policy discouraging multiple job offers for students, shoring up competency and skill-levels, and efforts to bridge the industry-academy gap.
Speaking to The Hindu , Prof. Shekhar said the best companies had been visiting the NIE regularly, and the average pay package offered by them this year was around Rs. 3.5 lakh per annum, while Google offered the highest pay package at Rs. 9.22 lakh per annum.
‘Good scenario'
“The general recruitment scenario is good across the country and reflective of India's industrial growth. But some of the core companies have started retrenchment in a big way in other countries, though not in India. While the job scenario may be bad elsewhere, it is looking bright in India,” Prof. Shekhar added.
He said recruitment was not confined to computer science and electronics, but uniform across all branches, including civil, industrial production, mechanical and electrical engineering.
Seventy companies, of which 25 are engineering companies and 45 IT companies, have, so far, recruited 431 students, who will join their respective companies in August 2012. The percentage of placement is 94 per cent of the eligible students, he said.
The major companies that visited NIE for the campus recruitment included Infosys , IBM India , Microsoft-GTSC, Yahoo India, Hewlett-Packard, Delphi, National Instruments, Sony India, Samsung, Ernst & Young, Larsen & Toubro, LG , Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India and TVS Motor Company, to name a few.
Flip side
Prof. Shekhar observed that the flip side to final-semester students having a job in hand was that the majority of them did not opt for higher studies, and there had been a drastic reduction in the number of students applying for postgraduate courses in most engineering colleges. “The earlier craze to write GMAT or GRE for admission to professional colleges abroad has also declined considerably over the years,” he added.
However, Prof. Shekhar pointed out, the introduction of the PGCET has started showing positive results, as there was more awareness among students about the kind programmes offered by a particular institute.
All the details pertaining to programmes on offer, the course structure and the institutions offering it were available online, and students with a specific interest in them have started applying. In this context, he cited the example of the postgraduate degree in Hydraulics offered by the NIE, and said that for the first time in many years, all the 18 seats had been filled. However, the enrolment rate for PhDs continued to be discouraging, Prof. Shekhar said.
