Tech giants are now vetting colleges

You can’t get more proactive than this. Apart from investing billions of dollars in their booming India operations, a growing number of tech MNCs, both Indian and foreign, are literally taking matters into their own hands and accrediting engineering colleges nationwide to train their students in specific areas.

For example, storage and information management giant EMC has started the EMC Academy Programme across 60 colleges and has 2,000 students enrolled in them. “Skilled people are difficult to locate in our industry and we need to get people industry-ready from college,” says Manoj Chugh, President (India and SAARC), EMC.

Elsewhere, chip giants TI and Intel have extensive university programmes in place to hone talent for the semiconductor industry and introduce students early to the market. TI, for example, has a list of 20 universities where it funds labs, provides industry expertise and has senior technical experts give guest lectures. Not to be left behind, the Indian IT services behemoths, too, are jumping into this game, as the hunt for employable talent goes to the next level.

TCS, for example accredited 400 colleges around the country, while Wipro had an even larger list of 1,500 colleges on its list. The company visited around 250 colleges last year and made 15,000 offers as part of its campus visits.

TCS’s accreditation programme works on a 1,000-point scale and colleges must get a minimum score of 750 to make the grade. Infosys, meanwhile, doesn’t run a specific accreditation programme, but has a list of 300 institutes it regularly visits and company executives keep close tabs on their performance.