Challenges for colleges to enhance job opportunities for their students

The colleges will have placement cell to ensure their students get into a best job after they complete the degree. They look forward to invite prestigious organizations to come for campus interviews. Organizations apart from campus interviews have tried various other models also to hire fresh talents and I could see some challenges they are facing with speed of acquiring business not going as per plan. There are different perspectives to look at the challenges all players are facing in industry - student’s perspective, college's perspective and organization's perspective. In this blog I am talking about college's perspective challenges.

The college concerned people will be thinking, which organization we should give chance first for campus interview when they approach? The one which was prompt in making reasonable offer and honoring the same last year or one which gave very good offer but failed in adhering to the commitments as in the offer letter last year? Or should we tie-up with some organization who will partner with us to ensure our student’s employment index goes up year on year? Getting prestigious organizations as preferred by students for campus interview also is another BIG challenge. What should college showcase to attract the prestigious organization to visit them for campus interview?

The colleges may look for solutions where students are taken closer to “deployment ready” kind of talent for software projects so that organizations will look at them differently when they interview during campus recruitment. As there is a constant communication from some top industry leaders from India that the academy and industry is not working together and there are gaps in skills when the engineers come out of graduation. The investment required on training engineers from the college taking time and effort for organization, delaying the business acquisition and hence the growth. Therefore college is looking for platform like Sandbox environment where students will learn in parallel along with academics, various skills required by the software industry and apply them on well designed exercises to sharpen their skills and come out confidently to face interviews.

Love to hear different views or comments from the college management community. 

Challenges for students to start their career in software engineering

The students will look forward to the college placement office to organize campus interviews from prestigious organization. Apart from this they may look at options to build skills and competencies which may increase their probability of getting the right job while they are in final year or after completing their course. There are different perspectives to look at the challenges all players are facing in industry - student’s perspective, college's perspective and organization's perspective. In this blog I am talking about student’s perspective.

Not knowing exactly what one should take up as their career will attend the first campus interview and do their best to get selected, with an acceptable offer in hand but no date of reporting mentioned in that! College placement center as a policy will not allow this student to participate in another campus interview organized later. Student will get confused if someone who is less performed academically compared to him/her gets an offer with date of joining also mentioned. Added to this challenge, they also get a letter sometimes from the organization where they have offer letter in hand, that the recruitment plan and training moved to next quarter due to business reasons. Students are really in confused status at that stage. The parents of such students are more worried about what to do when their qualified son/daughter is idle with offer letter in hand but not sure when he/she will start the career.

Parents may look for opportunity to sponsor for some other skill building training so that their probability of getting job increases. Potential skills to enter into software engineering are: Basics knowledge of software development life cycle (SDLC), Process models (like ISO 9001-2008, CMMi, TMMi), Test engineering skills. This will help them to understand the role of software testing in building quality software. From this stage either they can take career in test engineering path or software development path (after learning their choice of programming languages and/or various other software development tools).

Love to hear different views or comments from the student or impacted parents community. 

Challenges for organization to scale their team

I observed a pattern where many organizations will prefer to hire fresh engineers from prestigious college and invest reasonable time and effort in training them on various skills before start realizing contribution to the business from those new hires. Organizations have tried various other models also to hire fresh talents and I could see some challenges they are facing with speed of acquiring business not going as per plan. There are different perspectives to look at the challenges all players are facing in industry - student’s perspective, college perspective and organization perspective. In this blog I am talking about organization perspective challenges.

HR/Talent acquiring division gets requirements of new talents from different business units keeping in mind business plan under discussion. The budget of new talent acquisition is carefully used, HR team visits all top colleges, evaluate students as per organization process and make offer to the best candidates keeping the joining date approximate (subject to change) as requested by business units hiring them. Business situation force HR to move the date further and they do their best to get connected to the potential new hire but they see a risk of losing some of the right talent when they get clarity to bring them on board. Even if everything goes well they see some best students drop out giving admissions they got for higher studies as reasons, or not happy with role which is not their passion (forced test engineer role or forced development engineer role) or region/place of work not as expected by them etc. Oops! All investment to acquire talent and train them is going waste.

The organization must be wondering, how nice if they have a solution where they can get a potential talent pool from different sources just in time (JIT) to start contributing from day 1 of joining to the project. 

Assuming few steps normally happens when you hire fresh talent from campus – talent acquisition team effort, travel and stay, training investment on new hires for minimum three months on various skills from internal academy or external vendor, may cost totally per student approximately rupees 2.5 to 3 lakhs. Assuming a minimum salary plus over heads for three months, minimum training charges investment per day, total hiring cost spent by talent acquisition team divided by number of students hired we may find Rs. 3 lakhs as investment per student before they start contributing in project assigned.. This may go up if you are providing accommodation and food also during training period. From my experience there will be few exits due to job allocation which is not in their line of interest. That is another loss on investment made so far. 

JIT hiring opportunity of engineers well trained and groomed by a professional organization who understands the needs of industry, easily will save Rs. 3 lakhs minimum per student by going through this path. Assuming organization hiring in bulk like 100 in a batch every year will save rupees 300 lakhs!. The software professionals hired in this model are productive from first week after you train them on organization process and domain on which they are going to work.

Love to hear different views or comments from the software community.