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Information technology product companies for long have been suffering from acute shortage of workforce.
This segment, which generally absorbs about 10-15 per cent of all IT jobs, largely depends on internal strengths of companies to make the freshers industry ready.
An industry segment that long has been neglected, now can hope for an institutionalised mechanism to churn out good number of product engineers. It is more rewarding too. Average entry level salary in product firms is put at Rs 7.5 lakh against Rs 3-3.5 lakh in the IT services industry.
Srini Koppolu, former Managing Director of Microsoft India Development Centre, has teamed up with some ‘product lovers’ to set up Mission R&D, registered as a company, to train final year engineering students in Computer Science and IT streams. “We see a serious gap in the demand and supply. You have very highly talented students but they are not getting the right kind of education they require to find a product job,” Srini Koppolu, who is working with start-ups and investing in some after he quit Microsoft, told Business Line .
Mission R&D has piloted the project last year with 41 students, picked up from a couple of engineering colleges, and put them through a six-week summer course after they finished their third year exams. Half of them were hired by Microsoft, Cisco, PayPal and Sethu on the campus. “The rest of them too got placements after that,” he said.
Online mechanism
It developed an online mechanism to interact with the students and make them ready for the physical interaction with the faculty, who take a week’s off from their jobs to take classes.
“More than three lakhs people graduate in computer science and IT in India every year but only a few hundred are ready for product development roles. We do charge fee from students but that is to make the programme self-sustainable. We are targeting to reach out to 1,000 students in the initial phase using the online medium. And half of them would be women,” he said.
Perraju Bendapudi, Co-founder of Mission R&D and Partner Architect in Microsoft IDC, said they had scaled it up to 105 this year after screening 2,500 students from 12 colleges. “We are planning to expand this to Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. To begin with, we will start this in Bangalore,” he said.
kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in
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