KOCHI: The placement scene this season (2022 pass out) is seeing an interesting trend. Students who had chosen non-IT branches like Mechanical, Electronics, Electrical and Civil Engineering and others are being recruited to the IT companies and that too for enviable salaries. Doesn’t make sense, right?
Here’s the reason: To increase their job prospects, students of BTech Mechanical and Electronics are learning coding to get placements in the booming IT sector. According to placement officers, the trend emerged after the Covid lockdown slowed down the manufacturing and construction sectors.
“Many students have been learning coding and computer programming languages like Python on the side along with their original course,” said Dr Jacob Elias, placement officer, Cochin University of Science and Technology. According to Dr Kurian John, placement officer of Mar Athanasius College of Engineering at Kothamangalam, feeling the need to equip their students better, the college decided to provide them with the opportunity to learn coding as an additional skill.
“And it should be noted that all these students have done well during the placements with some bagging salaries to the tune of Rs 10 lakh in companies like BigBinary, an American company,” said Dr Kurian. According to Ahmed, a BTech Civil Engineering student of Cusat, it is tough to get a break in the civil engineering field for a fresher as it is. Besides, the slowdown due to the pandemic got me thinking of supplementing my skill sets.
“Besides, the lockdown, which forced us indoors, provided me with ample time to do some other courses besides my main one. So, to make the maximum utilisation of my time instead of wasting it surfing the net, I enrolled myself in the various free coding courses available. And this worked in my favour during the recruitment drive,” he said.
“Getting a breakthrough as a civil engineer will take many years. But I didn’t want to spend my time studying for the same without any means of income,” said Ahmed who got placed with the TCS Digital for Rs 7.8 lakh per annum as salary.
According to Sajith V, head of Centre for Training and Placement, National Institute of Technology, Calicut (NIT-C), such a trend does exist. “We too have students from non-IT branches being placed in the software companies. Learning to code has become an important thing even in the core industries. So, we have been providing a compulsory two-month course during the vacations to all our students irrespective of the branches,” said Sajith.
This has helped them get jobs in IT companies even as recruitment by the core industries has slowed down, he added. According to Jestin Joy, a EEE student from MA College of Engineering, Kothamangalam, though he had taken up the branch after realising the potential that electrical and electronics will have in the future, the realisation that it might not happen anytime soon led him to study Python programming language.
“With the coming of Tesla and other bigwigs, the prospects in the electric vehicle industry are promising. But right now, there is a slowdown while the IT industry is booming. The pandemic hasn’t affected the sector,” he said.
Jestin received two offers during the recruitment drive. “One was from BigBinary that offered me a package of Rs 10 lakh per annum and IBM offered me Rs 7.75 lakh. I have decided to go with BigBinary, which is an American company and would be beneficial for my growth in the future,” Jestin said, adding a couple of non-Computer Science friends of his in the Electronics and Communication Engineering, Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering have been placed at top software companies like TCS Digital, IQVIA and MITSOGO with salaries ranging from Rs 8 lakh to Rs 6 lakh.
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