Good news for fresh engineering graduates after a lull

Covid pandemic severely disrupted professional education, engineering last year. Despite the widespread adoption of online teaching, many engineering colleges were not able to complete the final year examinations. This has created a tricky situation for both students and companies like IT services firms. Usually, IT firms come to the college campuses at beginning of the fourth year of engineering programme and provide job offers to students.

Then, these selected candidates join their respective employers after completion of the final semester. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the holding of the final semester examination was delayed, which led to the slow absorption of fresh engineering graduates into IT firms last year. Though most companies have honoured their job offers by taking fresh graduates on their rolls, the process was painfully slow last year. Also, a dip in demand during the first two quarters (April-September) of the ongoing financial year made IT firms a bit cautious on their hiring outlook.

However, things have turned for better in the second half of the fiscal year. Demand has revived as enterprises globally digitise to reach out to end consumers amid strict social distancing norm. This has led to a higher number of large deals bagged by Indian software services firms. For instance, Infosys won its largest ever outsourcing contract worth around $3.2 billion from German automotive major Daimler in 2020. Such uptick in the demand environment has prompted IT services firms to provide an optimistic outlook on fresher hiring for the next financial year (FY22).

Management commentaries post the announcement of third-quarter earnings indicate that the top four IT firms- Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCL Technologies, Wipro - are planning to hire around 90,000 fresh engineering graduates in 2021-22. Market leader TCS plans to hire around 40,000 new engineering graduates next financial year. Similarly, Infosys is planning to hire about 24,000 fresher's next fiscal year, which is a sharp uptick from around 17,000 in FY21. For HCL Technologies, around 15,000 staffers will come from engineering campuses, while it will be about 12,000 for Wipro. Even most mid-tier IT firms including Tech Mahindra, L&T Infotech, and Mindtree are bullish on their hiring outlook for fresh graduates.

This augurs well for the engineering graduates, who are going to complete their degrees this year. At a time, when the Indian economy is likely to contract in FY21 due to the pandemic-induced demand disruption, such employment generation will help consumption-led growth, supporting demand revival. For the engineering graduates pursuing final year course, this brings in cheers by weeding out the uncertainty on future employment opportunities.