IT: Now a place for non-engineering students

IT: Now a place for non-engineering students


Multan: BSc student Sandhya K landed up with a job in an IT firm, just like her cousins with engineering degrees. The 21-year-old will join a Bangalore-based top company from July on a starting salary of Rs1.8lakhs, and her job profile includes a ‘non-technical’ activity like testing. Sandhya says four IT firms came to her college for placements.
Like Sandhya, there are several non-engineering graduates — most of them who are BSc graduates, while a few with BCom and BA degrees — who are getting absorbed by IT firms, especially for roles like testing, application development, maintenance etc.
Gopalji Mehrotra, global HR head of Zensar Technologies, says that non-engineering grads may need technical training to help them scale up, but they are a lot more flexible in approach and can be trained to meet various job requirements and be “moulded” into a particular job.
“The target for this financial year is to have a significant number of BSc, BCom and BA graduates as part of our talent pool, who can perform IT services roles,” says Pradeep Bahirwani, vice president of talent acquisition at Wipro Technologies, which is expected to hire 10,000-11,000 freshers in 2010-11, a blend of both engineers and non-engineers.
Mehrotra says that of 800 freshers that Zensar is looking at taking this year, about 100 will be BSc grads or diploma holders, and the rest would be engineers. According to Nandita Gurjar, senior vice president and group head of human resource, Infosys Technologies, of the approximately 20,000 new hires planned for 2010-11, about 1000 would be non-engineers.
According to Rishi Das, co-founder and CEO of Bangalore-based talent acquisition firm CareerNet Consulting, starting salaries for non-engineering grads range from Rs1.8-2.4 lakhs, against the Rs2.8-3.4 lakhs that fresh engineers are paid.

Source Link: http://www.dnaindia.com/academy/report_it-now-a-place-for-non-engineering-students_1383576