What was once considered a prestigious employment prospect for IITians has now ushered in a tough reality of unemployment for thousands of students. Of the students registering for the placement, a large number 38% are still unemployed, as the premier engineering institutes of India failed to place 7,911 of its students in the 2023–34 placement drive. Added to this is the fact that freshers are being offered wage package and some of the pass-out IT graduates have also been compelled to take the wage package below ₹6 lakh per annum. This is in total contradiction to the past when an IIT degree was guaranteed a good job in Bangalore, Chennai, or any other metro city. The IT industry is fast dwindling in terms of job offerings and hence the real challenge for IITians is that they have to find their way into the viable jobs for freshers available in the market.

Thousands of IITians Struggle to Find Job Opportunities

The IITs, the most prestigious bodies in India, focus on producing excellent Engineers are going through dark days. In the currently ongoing 2023–24 placements session, nearly 8,000 IITians are still left jobless, as it has been perceived from the RTI- based collation of the data conducted by an IIT Kanpur alumnus and placements mentor, Dheeraj Singh. This statistic alone is shocking, as is campus placement registration ratios currently stand at 38% for the students from this prestigious IIT, allowing one-third of the student’s placement on-campus, something that a mere IIT degree used to guarantee in the past.

Declining Placement Numbers and Dwindling Jobs Opportunities

While the number of IITians unplaced has increased to nearly the number of IITians placed across the country in the previous year and more than doubled the number compared to 2022, the gravity of the situation is astounding. This trend raises an alarm since IITs have been regarded as one of the best engineering institutions where all the qualified students who want to pursue engineering in India come to study.

Salary Packages Take a Hit

Experts have pointed out that due to the credit crunch, many organizations have had to reduce the remunerations offered to their employees, forcing the creation of new layoff slogans. Besides the fact that the number of available jobs has decreased over the years, the average offers to IITians, who are getting hired nowadays, have also undergone a reduction to approximately ₹17 lakh per annum. Although, by the standards of the current climate and its declineist point of view, this figure still looks rather tempting, cannot be compared to the million-dollar contracts that were once discussed so widely and eagerly. Surprisingly, there are instances when the top IITians had to finally settle for placement below ₹ 10 lakhs, with placement reports hinting at ₹300000 to ₹600000.

Factors Contributing to the Job Crisis

Tech Sector Layoffs and Hiring Freezes?

The consequences of the reductions and halts in hiring in the tech industry, especially the uber-large companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, have spilled onto campus recruitment. These negative outcomes are expected due to the drive for corporate profit and cost-cutting measures that companies have adopted, which result in the loss of first-tier tech sector employment chances. A large number of manufacturing firms that used to employ IITians are now either organizing interviews on their own or outsourcing them through consultants such as Times Ascent, and Dheeraj Singh elaborates that Wipro and Infosys, which used to employ about 20% IITians every year, have now frozen their new campus placements.

Identify Your Goals and Interests?

As Corden et al (2008) note, the phenomenon of jobless growth or employment elasticity that is equal to zero has been observed in many emerging economies in the recent past.

According to Singh, the qualitative finding suggests that jobs have decreased due to jobless growth in India. However, the REAL economy, the part that is expected to give Employment has been either stagnant or in decline, experiencing a negative employment growth rate despite the high economic growth embodied in the GDP. Old jobs have been Challenge 3 meant to be replaced by new technology, but new Opportunities for jobs are being created at a slow pace. Singh also mentions the paucity of policies that can open up job opportunities that match the skills and competencies possessed by engineering graduates, particularly top-ranked ones, not to mention those hailing from tier 2, 3, and 4 colleges.

Course Redundancy and Industry Demand Gap

As shown by the data in the paper, the value of Course Redundancy is moderate when it comes to the assessment of the industry demand gap. The other factor I consider as a reason for the job crisis is that the skills provided by IITs do not meet industrial needs. According to Singh, course duplication and mismatch between academic and industrial standards have been a big letdown, which has made it difficult for the IITians to establish themselves in the employment market.

The search for Employment in Bangalore and Chennai?

The available employment rate in large cities such as Bangalore and Chennai remains high and this has forced the graduates from IITs to open up their sourcing for employment in these major cities. The city of Bangalore has grown to become what is famously referred to as the ‘Silicon Valley of India,’ meaning that there is an abundance of job opportunities for holders of IT-related degrees, while the society of Chennai employs engineering graduates in manufacturing companies and the automobile industry, among others.

Bangalore: The Tech Capital

Technological infrastructure and the growth of start-ups, coupled with the presence of Giant companies in the IT industry have turned Bangalore into a hub for job opportunities, among IITians. Despite this, the city has not been left out in experiencing the fate of the tech industry; however, given the presence of many industries and companies that are diverse, the city offers more diversity of jobs than any other city.

Chennai: The Manufacturing and Automotive Hub

However, for the IITians who are devoid of interest in the technical sector, Chennai proves to be the best opportunity. The population of the city is advantageously associated with manufacturing and especially automotive industries, thus, postgraduate mechanical engineers could seek employment in mechanical design and production engineering. The main industry players are entrenched in these sectors and this makes Chennai a preferred destination for engineering graduates looking forward to job diversification.

Conclusion

Especially with the current volatile economic situation and other factors that affect the availability of the desired employment in the market, IITians are not left with the best deal to secure their dream job. However, platforms like rozgar.com might be useful to look into how com can serve as a valuable link between individuals searching for employment and those organizations that offer job opportunities.Thus, Rozgar.com can leverage advanced technologies in the job search and networking domain and provide premier services to its users enabling IITians to search for the right job among the huge competition and in different sectors of industries across the country.

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