Preparing students for the job market may be easy, but making sure they are employable is a mammoth task firms today are grappling with.
For instance, training institutes may promise students jobs in IT firms, but may never be able to fulfil the promise.
To address this issue, training firms are now trying to be organised, and have begun to tie up with colleges and companies, and train students according to the needs of the industry. For example, Bangalore-based Purple Leap, a three-year-old firm, has tied up with 82 engineering colleges in India to train second-year engineering students on industry-specific skill-sets . Amit Bansal, CEO of Purple Leap, says: “Engineering colleges are unaware of the skills required by companies, and in smaller cities, the placement records often carry incorrect information. Just a Java course is not enough when you are competing with thousands of others.”
He adds: “Many students go for institutes where they invest heavily on training for the industry, but often end up just doing various courses without the promise of a job.” Purple Leap has tied up with MindTree Consultants, Mahindra Satyam and Logica , and from training 300 students in 2008, it will leapfrog to training 40,000 by April 2011.
IT firms have also started tying up with colleges for ‘tailor-made’ employees. HCL subsidiary Career and Development has partnered with 25 colleges to train students on hardware and Dotnet 3.5 solutions. Ashish Koul, marketing and operations head in Noida, says: “Training on courses like Dot net 3.5 and Java not only makes school-leaving students eligible for HCL, they also get snapped up by companies like Wipro.”
EDS firm MphasiS tied up with Global Talent Track for getting employees for BPO and remote infrastructure management in 2009. Elango R, HR head, says around 35-40 % employees for particular divisions join the post after being specifically trained for them. “We have seen attrition rates drop by 30% when we get trained candidates,” he says.
Babuji Abraham, head of people function at MindTree, says about 20% of employees are hired from campuses. “Regarding their preparedness, we train them through e-learning or distance learning to make them MindTree-ready ,” he says.
Placement records for a Chandigarh engineering college show that specific skill training has led to 55 students getting placed at Wipro this year, up from five at Infosys last year.
Company-ready recruits are a boon for smaller firms too. Saurabh Chandra, CEO of Neev Technologies, which provides Web and mobile solutions and has hired 150 employees from colleges, says: “Our training costs have gone down by 50% since the candidates are already exposed to the technologies.”
Although courses range from ‘2,000 per semester for a second-year engineering student to ‘20,000 for one in the final year, students are more than willing to shell out to get a job. Anything to be better equipped in the cut-throat competition for employment.
