The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : `90 per cent of engineering students not yet job-ready'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 11, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

`90 per cent of engineering students not yet job-ready'

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, FEB. 10. "Ninety per cent of engineering students in the State, despite possessing adequate knowledge, are still not job-ready. The students need to work more to improve their professional and soft skills," Prof. E. Balagurusamy, vice-chancellor, Anna University, said today.

This factor emerged in the first cycle of the State-wide placement programme initiated by the university this year.

Of the 1,975 students from 168 colleges in the Chennai, Coimbatore and Madurai regions, who were screened by the information technology majors, Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant Technology Solutions and Wipro, only 207 found placement.

Tamil Nadu has over 220 self-financing colleges. Of them only 168 could sent students who were eligible or met the criteria set by the three IT companies for the Statewide recruitment. Finally, the selected students were only from 81 colleges. The other colleges could not get even one of their students recruited in the leading multinationals.

Poor communication

"From the feedback we get, it is clear that even students having enough knowledge do not possess communication skills and the courage and confidence required to get a job in TCS or Wipro ... Some students could not even initiate a discussion when they sat before the recruiters," Prof. Balagurusamy told newspersons after inaugurating another cycle of recruitment here.

Today over 850 students from different colleges in and around Chennai took a written and psychometric tests conducted by TCS.

The Vice-Chancellor said the Statewide campus placement programme had three objectives: To expand the scope of campus recruitment process, because big companies do not go to remote and rural-based colleges; to provide a bigger talent pool and thirdly to indirectly induce the colleges to improve the quality of teaching-learning process and the students' skill sets.

"This would also help the colleges compete among themselves." Prof. Balagurusamy said that next year the activities of the Statewide placement cell would begin early enough so that more companies could come into the fold.

"We have about 44,000 students in final B.E/B.Tech and my hope is that at least 8,000 of them, about 20 percent, would get placement in the top companies. Tamil Nadu has such a large pool of talent and knowledge, and top companies should first use our students here to fill the job vacancies and only then start looking outside the State," he said.

He said the next cycle of recruitment by the three companies would also be completed this month in Chennai, Coimbatore and Madurai.

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