Top IT companies won’t offer any salary hikes to fresh engineering graduates this year

As if finding a job in India's $160-billion IT industry wasn’t hard enough, fresh engineering graduates would have to deal with another disappointment this year. If reports are to be believed, they would not get to see any hike in their starting salaries anytime in the near future.

ET talked to human resources heads of top IT companies like TCS, Infosys and Wipro, as well as several IT recruiters and experts, and reported that these firms are unlikely to revise fresher-level wages amidst declining spending and struggles to protect their profit margins, and not to forget the rising inflation and cross-currency fluctuations.

However, a huge demand-supply imbalance can’t be ignored when it comes to the country's largest software services firms taking the liberty of not offering any hikes to freshers, since the dearth of jobs has led to one job being available for every five fresh engineering graduate.

Presently, India produces over 1 million engineering graduates every year, however, the number of jobs available in the IT industry is somewhere around 200,000-300,000, as per Nasscom data.

"Ten years ago, the supply-demand situation was neck to neck -- the number of engineers graduating was roughly similar to the number of jobs in the IT industry. That has changed drastically -- as of now, supply is 5 times as much as demand. When you have five people competing for one position, you don't have any incentive to raise salaries," said Achyuta Ghosh, head of research at Nasscom.

Image source