"Banking" on an engineering degree.

When I was driving out of Chennai towards a temple town suburb ( early monday morning), there were huge traffic blockades. Most of the vehicles occupying the road were the buses transporting students to private engineering colleges.

The boom of the last decade and the massive recruitment by India's biggest body shoppers ( oops! people call them IT companies) had ensured a steady inflow of "customers" to these private engineering campuses.

 A retired senior banker was travelling with me in the car.He had just returned after a week of interviewing for a PSU bank recruiting clerks.He told me that at least 60-70% of the candidates interviewed by him over the last week were engineering graduates. 

While this was initially shocking for him, he got accustomed to the idea over the period of  selection week.He narrated tales of candidates who couldn't clearly explain about their choice of engineering education. Many had gone through the degree for their parents sake and most of them had even borrowed heavily to enroll for the "coveted" engineering degree.The person also narrated tales of people working for IT companies who were willing to join the bank as clerks.

The salary paid for bank clerk's  ( which is not huge by today's living standards) was a big draw for the candidates who had applied for the job.

The banker said that while he had nothing against engineers becoming clerks, he said that they could have been wiser with their educational choices instead of falling in line with the crowd.

This career jam seemed much more severe than the hurdles that the sub-standard engineering colleges create on the road!

Fresh engineers batch 2010,2011,2012 ,2013 ! ( Hiring /Wanted)

The topic of  the post has nothing to do with the intention of this article. So, if you came into this post looking for a job, you can close this page now or else you can go ahead with this article.

Over the last decade, India became one of the largest IT service providers for the world ( Lets not talk about quality of the service now, that requires another post or one whole book rather). This made the IT service providers of various strata and tiers recruit "engineers"in masses  for providing IT related or enabled services to global clients.

Engineering colleges proliferated, campus recruitment was taken for granted . Quality of education, true engineering knowledge or skills started taking a back seat. No worries , until the "hungry" IT companies were ready to eat up a large chunk of the graduating engineers.  Students enrolled in most engineering colleges took IT jobs and "phoren" onsite opportunities for granted.( Yeah! to show off on Facebook profile and earn in some "stable" currency).

As recruitment started slowing down in 2012, the number of jobs offered by companies at campuses went down. Many placements were deferred too! Now , we have a bunch of  hopeful "engineers" left in dire. The situation may improve for these folks tomorrow. But who's to be blamed for this?. 

The passing out students cant be blamed for lack of jobs. But at least they should be blamed if  they lack basic engineering knowledge/skills or basic soft skills. Some may blame the colleges, but life is an outcome of choices you make. If your focus has been to "jump" into the "engineering" bandwagon just to land on a plum job ignoring the "quality" of the college ,Please don't blame the college. A "due diligence" on the quality of education is "our " responsibility. ( We must understand that the motto of most private colleges is to make "profits" and not to create a bunch of intellectuals).

Brushing up the skills as required by industry and willingness to try out new things , Openness to grab smaller opportunities may be a solution to the stranded engineers. Also,a positive attitude can help tide the crisis .

We shall overcome some day!