What to expect from the future placements? Part (3 of 4)

This is the Part 3 of our 4 part series of articles on: What to expect from future placements? Read the previous part here.

If there is one skill that everyone needs to be equipped with right now, irrespective of the field that they belong to, it is the programming skills and the ability to code. Last year’s placement season sprung a surprise to colleges and students alike, with many companies giving a lot of importance to programming skills in their recruitment process. Well, that was just a preview and its importance is only going to increase from now on. Here are a few reasons why:

• Tech startups are going to create 80K- 100K jobs annually. These startups don’t have large training departments and look at colleges to provide them with a skilled workforce
• E-commerce is going to create 50–60K jobs which would require technical skills
• Though automation is taking over the job sector, according to an EY report, 72% of the companies find availability of talent to implement automation as a challenge

The piece on jobs of the future, part 1 of this series, clearly indicates how important programming and IT skills are for most of the jobs that are going to be available in the future.

So, how equipped are your students with programming skills? To know that, let’s understand what programming skills mean. Programming skills are a combination of problem solving skills, algorithmic thinking and technical syntax knowledge.While the academic syllabi equips the students with technical syntax knowledge, problems that the students solve are very primitive. They don’t enhance their problem solving skills.

Your students need to solve complex and up to date industry problems, because that’s what the companies would be looking for. How do you get your students to do that?

• Encourage them to be part of platforms like Hackerrank where they could go and solve lots of programming challenges
• Hire a training partner who gets your students to practice on the latest programming challenges
• Encourage your students to take up internships. Internships are a great opportunity for your students to get some coding experience while solving some real life industry problems

Internships are not just a great way to learn new skills but they are also the gateway for getting into MNCs. In the next message, we will talk about why companies are increasingly giving importance to the internships as a recruitment channel.

Liked what you read? Share it with your friends or colleagues on WhatsApp.