No IT job offers in 3rd year: Nasscom

Updated on: Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Kolkata: Waiting for a campus interview by IT companies in your third year in college? No chance.

Nasscom — the premier trade body and chamber of commerce of the IT-BPO industry — has sent letters to the technological universities and institutes in the state, requesting them to hold back IT placements for students till they reach the final semester and pass out in July 2010.

In West Bengal, the semesters fall between January to June and July to December.

IT companies have learnt it the hard way that students have been neglecting their studies soon after they get an offer letter from companies.

“All the IT companies and institutes have come to an understanding that the students will be recruited from January 2010. Only final year students will be allowed to sit for the placements and not before,” said President of Nasscom, Som Mittal.
Academicians were also not very happy with the way students were taking their studies.

“We saw that students did not want to continue with higher studies like M-tech and research. As a result, we took the decision. A letter has been issued to a round 1,000 technological and engineering colleges across the country,” said Mittal.

Major IT bigwigs including Wipro, Infosys, CTS, TCS, IBM, PwC, Tech Mahindra have put their recruitment on hold till December this year. “It is a decision taken by the industry majors and we had to agree to it. The IT companies which recruited students at the end of their third year and beginning of the fourth and final year during the months of June and July till 2008 will now arrive only in January 2010. In 2008 several students were placed before they had completed the third year,” said Siddhartha Bhattacharya, placement and training head at Jadavpur University.

“It is a fallout of the economic slowdown. Several students, who had been given offer letters by the IT companies, still have not received a joining date. Where will they employ the new recruits? Thus, it is a wise decision to postpone the recruitment process in the recession-hit IT industry,” adds a senior JU faculty member.

Till now around 15 students have been recruited by a few IT companies which includes —Adobe, HP, Amazon and Atranta. Rest of the IT giants will only make an entry in the last semester.

In Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu), too, the IT company recruiters will come only after December.

“Our placements begin from December every year. We never allowed our third-year students to be recruited by any company. It hampers their studies. Thus, even if Nasscom has taken a decision, it will not delay our placement process,” says Ajay Roy, Vice-Chancellor of Besu.

Sabyasachi Sengupta, Vice-Chancellor of West Bengal University of Technology says, “In 60 engineering colleges affiliated to our university, most IT majors recruited students in their third year. There was a great need of manpower. The situation now is not so,” Sengupta said.

No IT job offers in 3rd year: Nasscom

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