NASSCOM EMERGE Community Catalyst for Growth of Emerging & Start-Up companies

Hari,

A relevant question for emerging startups/companies today!

The Team!

What is lacking in our system is proper training and development methodologies, which could be implemented right from the first year, when a student enters college. The principle applies to all (management, engineering, IT etc.)

The only solution to answering your question is a unique industry-academia partnership, which has been tried before many a times on several occasions and platforms, but hasn't been able to make an impact, as the corporate vision is again "nurturing" and "nurturing profits"!

Today we are asking such a question, because we all know of the quality of the majority of the graduates being pumped into the market each year. And again a majority of them still either unemployable by industry standards or simply not upto the mark, which forces the corporate to invest into the individual intellectually again.

Expectations from the "fresher" should be:

1. He/she should already be aware of the fact that college is over!
2. Domain knowledge (which could be honed upon as per the requirements by the corporate)
3. Understanding of hierarchy, work ethics of the organization
4. How do they contribute to the company's growth (which most corporate forget to share with the "employees" )

I strongly feel that, instead of investing at a "fresher" post recruitment, the industry should collaborate together, to hone the future prospective taskforce according to their own requirements.

Best Regards,

ParitoshS 

Broadly speaking, there are two group of students:

1. The ones that know what they want to do post college, with a clear career plan. In India, there are very few people in this category. Here passion is the key. These people are mostly on their own as they know what to do. In my opinion, the percentage of this category is high in developed countries.
   
2. The ones that study with an intension to get a high paying job. Most fall into this category.  Here getting a job is the key. I don't want to say this is a bad thing. Given the economic condition of our country, there is a fair reason for people to be in this situation.

I guess we are talking about people in in Category 2. It is better we start specializing on specific disciplines and NOT just skills sets. To elaborate on this, the curse of IT Services differenciation can be seen in the students too. Just like an IT Services company says we are an ".Net Shop" or "Java Shop", students also start saying I am .Net Person or a Java Person. .Net or Java are mere tools and NOT disciplines.

Let me quote an out of the ordinary example for a discipline: "Release Engineering". Release Engineering is a discipline which uses various concepts like Versioning, Concurrent Development, build processes, backup & restore procedures etc and employs various tools like CVS, SVN, SourceSafe, ClearCase, Shell / Batch Scripting, depending upon platform, situation, requirements, etc. The industry really needs people who specialize in specific disciplines and not just tools. We have a long way to go.

For a more common example:  I would look for a person with Object-Orientation rather than C++ or Java. There is a related article from Martin Fowler, that I love on Prefer Design Skills Over Tools

Suresh

I think the difference in the behaviour of fresh graduates between Western countries and India that Suresh points out is more due to cultural than educational reasons. Regardless, I guess what we need is an actual LIST, like Hari asks, of expectations. So here's just about everything but the kitchen sink. If any of you find such paragons of virtues, tell us and we'll believe Santa Claus is a real person!

1. Be punctual
2. Be neat and tidy in appearance, without being flashy or promiscuous
3. Display a positive attitude
4. Be energetic
5. Follow instructions
6. Be able to read and understand written information
7. Have good listening skills
8. Maintain clean and healthy habits at work
9. Know how to use basic work materials and equipment
10. Be organized
11. Take initiative
12. Have some self-knowledge about personal (not professional - that comes later in life!) strengths and weaknesses
13. Be willing to learn from others
    
14. Be willing to help others without impacting your own deliveries
    
15. Be willing to admit a lack of knowledge
16. Be willing to admit mistakes
17. Communicate effectively both in speech and in writing
18. Be culturally sensitive
19. Be dependabile in a clearly operational sense
20. Enjoy sports or some form of exercise
21. Be a "team player"
22. Have basic arithmetic, writing, speaking and comprehension skills
23. Have good problem-solving skills
24. Work hard AND work smart
25. Have a willingness to use tools
26. Be curious and interested, in a professional sense
27. Be creative
28. Work without close supervision
29. Work well under pressure
30. Be loyal to the organization.

I've tried to list the items not in any order of preference but in the order that people will probably notice a new person's attributes over time. For example, the first things that stick out are about someone is their being on time, being well-turned-out, etc.

Also, I've left out the more obvious but acquired things like "Kiss up to the boss"...

Please feel free to add/delete/modify!

Paritosh, Suresh, Kishore,

Brilliant .... This is quite useful.

Expect NOTHING except the ability & high energy level to learn and change towards the list of 30 performance attributes listed by Kishore. 

Believe me, most of them don't know what they can give to the organization but they are sincere to GIVE.

I agree with Lakshman Sir.

That spark of sincerity is the promise of a fresher turning good resource to an organisation.

Kishore Sir, I think 30 points mentioned are good one (concrete points), but i believe an employer/organisation would be expecting majority of the points from an employee too, these points gets developed and inculcated by an organisation in an employee's lifecycle over the period of time specifically 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25 (flexibility, openess), 27, 28 (no continuous spoonfeeding), 29, 30. Expecting all of sudden from a fresher even in a span of 3 - 6months is being bit stringent on fresher's catagerory.

I appreciate a point by Paritosh that sentization of freshers that now college time is over, it an organisation with certain decorum in terms of dress code, time, casualness, less time on mobile, chatting while working (my experience).

Suresh Sir, I really liked the point, discipline, yes rather than focusing only on Tool, organisation must emphasize on domain knoweledge, if this direction is being given from the beginning to a fresher it will be win win situation for him/he and she/he will always appreciate that point in her/his career graph.

Whatever points i have tried to emphasized are based on my dealing with freshers, we started taking up freshers in our IT division a year back and found out of 10, 6 of them brilliant performers absolutely upto the mark, deliveries were recommendable, down to earth behaviour, dedication towards work, sincerity, respecting the protocol, positive approach.

I thank this forum of emerge members involved in this discussion for coming up with such a constructive thought process and of course a good question by Hari Sir too, to be given thought over by every organisation.

Regards

Jyoti

This is indeed a major issue affecting the IT industry in India. NASSCOM data shows that only about 25% of engineering graduates are employable. Even those employable are not readily deployable. IT Industry spends between 16-24 weeks in training to make the campus graduates deployable. NASSCOM data suggests that IT industry spends close to USD 0.75billion annually on training fresh campus graduates.

I have founded a company AlmaMate (www.almamate.in) to address precisely this issue. The focus of AlmaMate is to make fresh engineering graduates employable and readily deployable in the IT industry. This is accomplished by giving the graduates hand-on experience by working on simulated 'live' projects replicating the real-life environment. They also get exposure to specific industy domains. In addition the graduates go through personality tranformation program. This program enhances their communication skills and gives them the poise and confidence to perform in the actual industry environment. This initiative will help IT companies drastically reduce their on-boarding costs.

This initiative has a larger purpose behind it. We plan to reach out to tier II/III colleges in tier II/III cities and bring graduates from these colleges into the national mainstream.

I would request for inputs from all the members to make this initiative a success.  

Excellent Topic and Excellent list by Kishore! Thanks! Like Kishore pointed out, it may not be possible to recruit freshers with all those qualities but I believe it is possible to recruit freshers with AS MANY of those qualities as possible IF ENOUGH DUE DILIGENCE IS DONE at the Resume Filtering stage and personal interviews!

Our company does an initial filtering of Resumes based on consistency on educational achievement. It is still possible to find freshers that have consistently done well in high school and college. Or shown remarkable turnaround in college even if the high school grades are not that spectacular! Some of these guys do realize that they have been screwing around and realize that they better do well in college!

Then we administer a series of tests, Dot.Net, C, C++, Java, SQL Server - it is usually two or three of these tests, not all. That gives you a comparison across the filtered resumes.

The most important filtering mechanism is the Personal Interview. We spend at least an hour talking to each possible recruit. I spend a lot of time talking about "the subject that they liked best in College" and then dig deeper in which ever subject they mention. You can spot the bullshitters in the second question if they just pick some subject off the thin air. Lack of depth will show up quickly.

We spend a lot of time evaluating their final projects and class projects. The usual
Libarary management system or "bought" projects show themselves up very quickly.

We have found freshers who have done final projects on their own initiative with or without any help from their college. These are the people who have learned something on their own because they want to - they show initiative and lots or promise.

We have never failed in using these to pick good freshers. It takes time and patience and it can work - as long as you are less than a certain size.

After a certain size it becomes more and more difficult to spend that much time and effort recruiting good freshers!

All the best!