Students in tier 2 and tier 3 engineering colleges struggle for placements 

While students at top engineering colleges in the city often bag plump packages after their graduation, students in tier 2 and tier 3 colleges are finding it difficult to secure decent placements this year amid the recession and layoffs at MNC companies. Apart from that, students from branches other than Computer Science (CS) and Information Science (IS) have revealed that companies are not even turning up at colleges to recruit.

A student from a private engineering college in Koramangala said only three companies had turned up at her college to recruit from the Electronic Communication (EC) branch. “The college had promised 100% placements when we joined. Now, there are very few companies coming here for EC, and there are no recruiters for the civil and mechanical branches. Even the companies which are coming are start-ups and are offering a package of ₹4 lakh per annum. Our fees for four years was more than that,” said Vineetha S. 

Offer letters

She added that with not many job drives outside of the campus and slim chances of direct recruitment outside, students are deeply worried about their future now. In a few other colleges, students who were informed that they had been placed are not being issued offer letters without any reasons being disclosed. 

“All big companies want to recruit from CS or IS branches. Even if they take interviews of students from other branches, they expect us to know programming and coding, which is completely different from what we have studied. In my batch, only five people have been placed so far, and three of them have not been given offer letters. The college is not even following up on it and asking the students to get in touch with the companies,” said Sahana K., a student at an engineering college on Bannerghatta Road. 

COVID batch

Other than the aforementioned problems, some students also said that falling under what is now being called the “COVID batch” - or the students who got their academic training in virtual mode, is proving a disadvantage to them when it comes to skill sets. The students said that their colleges did not provide adequate placement training to help them with this problem. 

“They provide us placement training for a month or so before the companies arrive, and that is not enough. They should start training us from the first year itself so that we would be equipped with skills that the industry is looking for by the end of our course,” Ms. Sahana remarked.

Global recession

Many colleges also acknowledged that the number of recruiters had come down this year, especially when it came to U.S.-based companies due to the global recession. Due to this, bulk recruitment is not happening, which is why students are not being placed as usual. 

“The numbers are good when it comes to start-ups and middle-cap companies, but bulk recruiters are coming in smaller numbers. As the U.S. markets seem not to be very buoyant right now, the top five to seven companies which were coming for recruitment have not visited campuses or offered fewer jobs this year,” said Lakshmi Narayana, placement director, CMR Institute of Technology. He also said that there had been a few cases of delayed joining dates when it came to the bulk recruiters.