Infosys to hire 20,000 from campuses in India

TRIVANDRUM(India),February16 2012: T Infosys Technologies will hire 20,000 people from campuses across the country during fiscal 2012-13.Company Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director S D Shibhulal said the company was well on track to meet its target of hiring 47,000 persons during the current fiscal year. Infosys has hired 23,000 persons from the campuses during 2011-12. He told Khaleej Times that IT companies were not getting adequate people from the campuses as more than 75 per cent of the fresh graduates were not employable. He said concerted action was required to make the youth industry ready. Shibhulal said there was need for a review of the current curriculum and qualitative improvement in the faculty. According to him, the curriculum should be realigned with the industry’s needs. It is highly theoretical now.
Regarding the faculty, he said that now the engineering colleges were not able to attract talents. He said that the engineering talents were skipping the colleges as they lacked the professional atmosphere to nurture their career. Apart from high salary, the engineering talents require research facilities to widen the frontiers of their skills. Unfortunately, majority of our colleges pay scant attention to research, he added. Shibhulal said Infosys was trying to reach out to the engineering college students to make them employable through its ‘Campus Connect’ programme. He said that the company had brought 300 colleges under the wings of the Campus Connect. He said that the unique programme was intended to build a sustainable partnership with engineering education institutions in India and abroad for mutual benefit and producing “industry ready” recruits. Campus Connect seeks to align the college curriculum with the industry’s needs. Under the programme, Infosys designs industry-oriented topics and provide the courseware to students besides giving them projects to do, and also provide sabbaticals for the faculty. The company also organises seminars and training sessions for the faculty to give them an industry perspective, enabling them to train the students accordingly. Shibbhulal said that the programme had helped Infosys in getting quality products from the colleges. As regards the future expansion plans, the Infosys CEO said that the company will focus more on Tier II cities in future as the Tier I cities had reached the saturation points. Infosys will increase its strength in the Trivandrum development centre from 5,000 to 10,000 in the next two to three years. The company will establish a development centre at Indore in Madhya Pradesh as soon as land is available. The other cities where Infosys has centred its focus include Jaipur, Pune, Mysore, Mangalore and Bhubaneshwar.