The slowdown has forced management and engineering graduates to abandon their hopes of getting jobs that match their qualifications.
In this market, I’ll do any job. Beggars can’t be choosers... This is the sentiment echoing in the mind of fourth year engineering student Manoj Mehta (name changed).
The 23-year-old computer engineering student, who dreamt of landing a plush job with an IT company, has to be content with initial responses shown by a local call centre, which is willing to take him as a customer service agent for Rs7,500 a month.
Manoj, who is studying at an engineering institute in a far-flung suburb of Mumbai, needs a job immediately after graduating in June, to support his family. Manoj’s sister lost her job in a financial services firm some months and the family, which includes his retired father and mother, are pinning hopes on him.
But the slowdown this year has thrown water on the Mehtas’ hopes with Manoj’s college placing only 50 out of 400 students till now.
With the institute’s professors throwing up their hands, Manoj went on a job-hunting spree in January, posting his resume on job portals, approaching each and every IT firm that came to mind, and beseeching college seniors to help place him somewhere.
When all failed, Manoj approached some call centres in Mumbai and finally got a positive response this week.
He doesn’t mind that after all these years of rigorous studying and shelling over Rs2.5 lakh, all he may get to do after graduating is dealing with customer calls.
“A call centre job is better than being at home jobless. Further studies require a lot of money. I have no choice as companies are not taking in freshers, especially those from smaller institutes,” Manoj said.
Bhupesh Gupta, business manager at Bangalore-based recruitment company CareerNet Consulting, said hiring of freshers, especially from non-IITs and IIMs, is moving at a snail’s pace.
Despite slogging it out and shelling out huge fees, the slowdown has forced management and engineering graduates to abandon their hopes of getting jobs that match their qualifications.
“Students from Tier II, III, IV colleges have no choice but to look for low-end jobs like website designing, content designing, customer service agents and tele-sales agents, which may pay Rs 2-3lakh,” says Bhupesh Gupta, business manager at Bangalore-based recruitment company CareerNet Consulting.
Like Manoj, MBA student Vinayak K is panicking with each passing day. The second year management student, who had to fork out over Rs5.5 lakh for an MBA from an institute in Hubli, a small town about 420 km north of the IT hub of Bangalore, is having sleepless nights with few companies turning up at his campus for placements.
Vinayak has applied to seven companies from the financial services and IT domains, but the response has been same: We are not hiring now.
He says that a job will help him with experience, which can manoeuvre his career. “Some job is better than no job. I am ready to work without a salary, as an intern, for experience. But even that seems tough.”
Like Manoj and Vinayak, there are several students from non-elite engineering and MBA colleges for whom the immediate future appears bleak.
India has about 1,383 engineering institutes and 1,083 MBA institutes, affiliated with the All India Council for Technical Education, catering to nearly 500,000 and 300,000 students respectively.
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