The days of mass recruitment drive where information technology companies recruited hundreds of candidates and later provided them on-the-job training were over, said Manikandan Thangarathnam, Director, Alexa Voice Service, Amazon India.
Delivering the convocation address at Kalasalingam University here on Sunday, Mr. Thangarathnam, said that though employment opportunities still abound, the companies now expect the graduating engineers to be highly skilled during recruitment itself.
“There is a perception that job opportunities are low. But if you ask the IT companies, they will say that there are several vacancies but they are not finding appropriate talent,” he said.
He added that companies like Amazon were in need of software developers with excellent coding skills as they were in the risk of losing customers if their IT systems were not good. “For instance, if Amazon’s website takes more time to load, customers could in seconds go to other e-commerce sites,” he said.
Mr. Thangarathnam told the graduating students that this was the best time to be engineers as technology was rapidly revolutionizing the way people live.
“The changes in lifestyle of the people in the past four to five years was tremendous compared to a decade or two before that,” he said.
“The reason for this rapid change is because technology has become cheaper and accessible to more number of people. Consequently, there is rapid growth in services provided through technology like e-commerce and mobile application based cab services,” he said.
Stating that transformation through technology was only going to accelerate further, Mr. Thangarathnam said that engineers therefore will have a huge role to play.
Stressing on the role a college played in moulding students’ careers, Mr. Thangarathnam lauded Kalasalingam University for providing excellent facilities for its students to learn.
A total of 954 M. Phil, Ph.D, under-graduate and post-graduate students from the university were awarded degrees during the convocation.
Earlier, S. Saravana Sankar, Vice Chancellor of the university, welcomed the guests and presented the annual report.
K. Sridharan, Chancellor of the university, presided over the function. S. Shasi Anand, Director, V. Vasudevan, Registrar and senior staff members from various departments of the university were present at the function.
[Source:-The Hindu]
