Job placement,
especially when it comes to freshers is a puzzle to solve. Thanks to
mushrooming engineering colleges/Software Training institutes, India has become
a country, where people first become engineers and IT professionals, then
figure out what they want to do in their career / lives! Here is our view on
100% job placement stories.
Next flock
Come June, another
batch of engineering students will be passing out of college. Given that
hardly 20% of them are employable, next step for them is to start searching for
courses with training institutes. Thanks to the lower level entry barrier, every
corner of the town / city is filled with institutes claiming “100%
placement assurance” | “We guarantee you a job” | ” Join our course, walk
out with a job offer” etc. How much truth is there in such job placement
advertisements? Let us have a look.
Profile of an engineer
Here is how these
institutes see a typical profile of engineer who is looking for a job
placement:
1. Graduated from a tier-2 or tier-3 engineering
college from a town / city
2. Has no clue about problem solving. Somehow got
into or pushed into engineering because of societial / parental pressure etc.
3. Can hardly communicate his views to others
4. Has very high expectation job placement with a
plush IT company with six digit salary. He strongly believes that he deserves
that, even though he has not written more than 10 lines of program in any
programming language on his own
With such a backgound
when they walk out of college the 100% job placement creates a wave in their
minds. This is mainly because such messages makes them believe that all it
takes to hand in a high paying job is just a 2-3 months affair. The story
goes further where they get cheated by such institutes without any job
placement. They forget the fact that if 4 years of engineering can’t get them a
job, how come a institute with a 3 month training program can do that?
Job placements – top institutes no different!
Cut to so called top premium
institutes with accreditation (Don’t ask accrediting agency !!!). We hear
some of these institutes send their students to interviews in few companies and
some of them are getting placed also ( don’t worry about what type of company)
and put their reviews in YouTube( who knows if they are real reviews). This
makes most of them believe that these institutes are great career launchers. The
reality is different there also. Even in so called premium institutes more than
50% of the students pass out of the campus without having a job placement. It
is not a institute’s mistake, but an individual failed to meet expectation of
the company in some form or other( For god sake, please understand that) . If a
engineer from top notch engineering college can’t get into campus job placement
how come anybody can get into a job directly. Every student needs perseverance.
Bottom line
So the bottom line is
– If an individual doesn’t meet entry criteria for a job placement, he doesn’t
get selected, irrespective of the type of institute including ours. Rather we
can go ahead and say nobody ( certainly us, can give a job guarantee to
anybody. Agreed, finishing schools (called as training institutes) play a vital
role in bridging the gap. However bridging the gap is not very easy given the
so much of limitations with engineering students as mentioned above. It
requires a very systematic and step-by-step and careful approach to make an
individual employable. That is what one should expect from these institutes.
Our journey
Its been a very interesting
journey for us in Metaforum Technologies by going through this cycle. However
we have a clear view about how we are going to approach this challenge. In
alignment with our training philosophy of ‘coach’ and ‘applied learning’ we
take the training approach as follows:
1.
Engineers should solve
problems – IT is not very different. To start with we build a strong base
by making individuals to convert a given problem statement into working
program. In such approach more than 80% of the time is spent time with analysing
the solving the problem on paper before jumping into writing code.
2.
Once the base is built,
the next step is to apply into various scenarios. Say in case of Java, its
about using it for writing a web based application that runs out of a server
etc.
3. Shaping up behavioural skills is a parallel
activity. Be it in terms of discipline, communication, openness etc.. by taking
a long term view of the career. This requires constant monitoring of
individuals and providing them with timely feedback on how they can work on
these individual skills. Apparently putting them across working professionals
(via our industry mentors, one of our mentor Mr. Raja is a patent holder), we
are able to see significant changes in shaping up behaviour
4. During the process not everybody is equal.
Some might do well and some might not. In such cases taking continuous
improvement approach helps. In case an individual lacks in a specific area,
providing additional coaching and support in that area has helped them to come
out of it by building lot of self confidence
Conclusion
We are not
recommending above mentioned steps is a sure short receipe for making an
individual job ready. However we have seen very positive results in terms of
job enablement by successfully converting college students into working
professionals. Based on our experience we can say that it takes time (atleast 4
to 6 months) to transform individuals during which they need to be co-operative
and working hard. Thats the only simple and sure shot way to achieve job
guarentee rather than taking any short cut steps.
In the mean time watch
out if anybody says 100% job placement guarantee, because we clearly know what
it takes to get there!
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