For the first time, Tata Consultancy Services is taking its NextStep initiative to colleges that, in the past, did not get an opportunity to place students.
NextStep is an initiative that connects newly graduated engineering students in disciplines such as B.Tech, BE and MCA from different colleges to TCS through a Web portal.
IT companies work with academia through specific courses on technologies like Java, C++ and Hadoop to help students in transitioning into their jobs.
“In the past, by the time we went to 360 colleges, positions would be filled and that meant we could not tap into the workforce of the other 90 colleges, which we are keen to do now,” said Ajoy Mukherjee, Executive Vice-President and Global Head of HR for TCS.
Typically, large IT companies go to campuses of colleges like Vellore Institute of Technology or VJTI in Mumbai and give out job offers to thousands of students a year before they graduate so that they can be put into projects as soon as they take up the offer.
Better demand
Annually, TCS goes to around 450 colleges and others like Infosys goes to around 358 colleges, according to 2013 annual report data.
However, Infosys last year had said that it will make 6,000 campus offers, significantly fewer than the 25,000 campus offers that TCS made this fiscal, signalling better demand for its outsourcing services, according to analysts.
“Generally, this instils confidence in the deal pipeline of the company,” said Ankita Somani, IT and telecom analyst with Angel Broking.
Overseas programme
Analysts also believe that higher employee utilisation (which for TCS in the last quarter was 84 per cent) means more employee productivity, which augurs well for the company’s revenue and profitability. Currently, TCS has around 2,85,000 employees.
It is not only in India that TCS is looking to get this talent. “We are working with Chinese colleges, where we have internship programmes, in addition to the ones in Latin America, US, Canada and Hungary,” said Mukherjee.