CHENNAI: Campus placement is the biggest factor that is influencing student choices as well as the standard of a college these days.

With colleges too taking efforts to make their students more employable, students attending counselling (even while evaluating a college on the basis of infrastructure and teaching faculty), should look at facilities in colleges for improving their placement record.

Heads of institutions concede the point that branches make little difference for recruiters, who look for specific strengths — communication and team work skills, their ability to learn quickly on the job and problem solving capabilities, besides a strong understanding of basics in core areas.

Engineering colleges are scaling up their infrastructure capabilities as also their placement and human resource development cells.

But academics concede that the basic input in the institutions also need to be strengthened. Now that the new curriculum is in place, what is needed is intrinsic capability of students.

The proof lies in the figures this year. Velammal Engineering College, one of the top rated colleges even by Anna University's rankings based on only academic results, reached a new high of 213 placements this season, split nearly equally among all the branches.

College Principal Rathinasabapathy says a concerted attempt was made this year to scale up the students' abilities by conducting workshops for communication abilities and interview facing skills using outside experts.

Career counseller Jayaprakash Gandhi argues that such colleges have a basic high level of input and students with higher marks get into them, which is making a difference in placements. For example, he notes, Thyagaraja College of Engineering, Madurai, with a long tradition of providing quality education, achieved a record of 413 placements in six I.T. majors. This included 15 from Civil Engineering, 21 from Mechatronics and 35 from Mechanical branches. A spokesman for SRM group of institutions notes how its placement cell achieved a record of 662 job offers, across all branches. In fact, three job offers were for Architecture students, 11 from Chemical Engineering and 13 from Civil.

Placement officers say even IT companies require persons with different capabilities and particular domain skills. A company such as Cognizant or Tata Consultancy Services requires persons with strong domain skills in core areas such as construction, mechanical or production engineering. Another spokesman for a multi-national IT company says: "The days of software engineers are over. These days technologies and applications change every year and no curriculum can keep pace with this. So the recruiters look for persons who can solve problems, deconstruct and reconstruct a situation, have strong numerical and application skills, besides communication capabilities."

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