The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Manufacturing sector worried about recruitment

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 12, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Manufacturing sector worried about recruitment

V. Jayanth

Graduate engineers queue up for information technology jobs Graduate engineers queue up for information technology jobs

The Tamil Nadu State-level Placement Programme organised by the University, in Coimbatore. — File photo

CHENNAI: The IT and ITES sectors may be worried they are not getting the good candidates, perhaps not even enough to meet the projected demands. But the manufacturing industries are now worried that if the current trend continues, they may run out of qualified hands to handle the engineering jobs in the sector.

Over the past three years in particular, the IT and ITES units have taken away the cream of students, and perhaps a majority of the graduate engineers passing out of the nearly 250 colleges in Tamil Nadu. The demand has been so high and the initial offers so attractive that students want to be absorbed by them. As the IT majors and software firms have recruited even Mechanical, Chemical and electrical engineering graduates of late, any student who has the basic requirement — in terms of academic proficiency and communication skills — wants an IT job. The parents too encourage and nudge their wards to keep trying for an opening in this lucrative sector.

To cater to this demand, many private self-financing colleges have also increased their capacity for IT and related courses. Almost 50 per cent of the over 70,000 seats on offer in the State are for these courses.

As a result, there are only a few takers for the manufacturing sector. Industries looking around for Mechanical, Civil or Production engineering graduates say they are unable to attract the "good performers." They tend to pick up those who have scored lower than the cut off insisted upon by the IT sector — which may be above 70 per cent from say the SSLC or Tenth standard public examinations to the B.E. or B.Tech final year. There are also the students who are "carrying" a few subjects from the previous years till they clear all of them in the final year.

The reasons are not far to seek. College Principals and Human Resources consultants explain that the lowest offer from an IT or software firm is about Rs. 20,000 a month, and for the IT majors and the best of students, it is much higher. But in the conventional manufacturing sector, the entrance level salaries remain in the Rs. 8,000 to Rs. 10,000 a month range. Considering the cost of higher education, especially in the self-financing colleges, parents and students alike are keen on securing the high-paid jobs. The argument is that even a B.A. or B.Sc. graduate picked up by the call centres is offered anywhere between Rs. 6,000 to Rs. 8,000 at the time of placement.

Says HR consultant T.K. Pandian, who has interacted with manufacturing industries for over 15 years: "My recent interactions with CEOs of large companies have shown their inability to retain even mediocre talent engineers. Our manufacturing sector has itself become a feeder-cum-training base for the IT sector."

Some of the senior industry sources explain that the salary structures in the manufacturing sector have also risen, but could still not be equated with the services sector or the IT sector. Given the costing and profit margins, it was essential for the manufacturing units to remain competitive. They also pointed to "much higher salaries in the pyramid structure."

Just as the fall in demand for seats in "pure science" courses has raised concerns and set the Science and Technology establishment thinking, the manufacturing sector will also have to review the recruitment scenario over the next decade. Unless corrective measures are initiated now, there may be a crisis on hand before long. "Unfortunately, nobody seems to be looking at this issue in a broader perspective in terms of growth, employment generation and future needs of industry," Mr. Pandian says.

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