Number of fresh engineering graduates accepting job offers from TCS, Wipro has gone up

With number of jobs in Indian IT sector shrinking, fresh engineering graduates are taking job offers from wherever they are getting.
The mismatch between demand and supply in information technology jobs in huge and now engineering students are going for more secure jobs with the biggies.

Now, most of the fresh engineering graduates are accepting campus offers from Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro.

“At Wipro, job acceptance rates have risen to 85% from 65% three years ago,” an executive told ET, adding, “this is an inevitable fallout of the overall demand-supply imbalance that you're seeing across the industry. As growth rates have fallen over the past decade, the number of jobs has shrunk and there are fewer options available for graduates. Gone are the days when they could pick between three-four different job offers," said the Wipro executive cited above.”

Applications are surging - trebling at Infosys to 1.16 million in FY16 from FY13's 379,000.

As per a report by Kotak Institutional Equities, 1.5 million engineering graduates pass out in India every year while the jobs are pegged at 200,000-250,000.

"The number of engineers graduating currently is far too high. And absolutely, there is a demand-supply imbalance because of that. When you have a large number of youngsters coming into the job market, you need the economy to be growing at an extremely high rate to match that supply, which is not happening right now," Vivek Kulkarni, former IT secretary in the Karnataka government, told ET.

Adding to the woes of engineering students will be automation, which is going to hit the recruitment rate very hard.

As per HfS Research, India's IT services industry will lose 6.4 lakh low-skilled jobs to automation by 2021.

According to latest All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) estimate, only 1 million engineering jobs are likely to be created over the next five years, implying that millions of graduates may find themselves unemployed.

"We are currently seeing acceptance rates of well over 90%. Earlier, the range used to be around 80%. What we are seeing is increasing maturity amongst students when it comes to accepting job offers. Part of the reason is also due to the lower number of offers from the services industry," KS Sridhar, dean of placements at People's Education Society Institute of Technology in Bengaluru, told ET.

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