Are we forgetting them?
“He is an engineer and a distinction holder at that. Does he have good attitude? Big time!”
The wave of the information technology industry while undoubtedly having given lakhs of citizens of our country an entry into professionalism and a life of compliant and comfortable consumerism in it’s crest, seems to have left a couple of annual generations in its base.
It is but common experience that companies experience annual frenzies called recruitment drives in engineering colleges where they vie each other to grab freshers. These freshers are not immediately ‘billed’, but are put through a learning cycle wherein they are effectively made to unlearn more than they are needed to learn! By this, I am referring to the focused range of skills (Languages/tools) that they are made to master. Thus, we seem to be effectively recruiting them for their ability to learn rather than the competencies that they posses.
While recruiting for a HR operations assistant, it was the author’s experience that out of the ten resumes shortlisted for the post, seven of them turned out to be those of engineers who had graduated in the years 2001 and 2002. They were all good students going by their marks and all of them were either computer science engineers or Electronics engineers.
All of them were victims of the downturn that the IT industry experienced and hence the subsequent freeze that was imposed on campus recruitments. Thus, the lofty dreams of a good job that they could look forward to were no longer around.
On further investigation, the author discovered that approximately 60% of those who had passed out in the years 2001 and 2002 seemed to have either augmented themselves with a MBA or had continued with ‘not very well’ paying jobs which in turn seem to have drawn them into vicious cycle that keeps them away from a job that many of their juniors have! The object of our discussion is the latter segment.
What are your views on taking this segment of ‘freshers’ who seem to have been forgotten by us, skilling them appropriately and providing them with a ‘life’?
Do write in with your inputs!
~Sid
1 comment:
2 issues with regard to training costs - both technical and soft-skill wise
(1)technical (re)training of older ones takes longer time than for the freshers, because you have to pour in the new wax on an old mould, still hoping to achieve same performance results -- unless of course the moulds are exceptionally flexible and receptive
(2)Along the same line of thought as the previous one, another major issue is the "emotional baggage" that they might be carrying from their previous work experiences. This is more tricky to deal with, simply because it will not be that easily evident, and so not easily re-trainable
HR being already tagged (quite unjustifiably, in my opinion)a "cost-incurring function", how will the management perceive such a move as you have aspired? (unless ofcourse they are either desperate for people, or "venture capitalists" in terms of innovative recruitment)
Please do correct me if I'm wrong regarding any of my understandings above.
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