For IT cos, there's talent beyond B'lore

BANGALORE: For IT companies finding it difficult to hire enough talented, fresh, engineers in Bangalore, here’s some news. Students in secondary cities in Karnataka like Mangalore and Bellary are almost on par with their peers in Bangalore in terms of communication and soft skills. Currently, there’s a belief that students from tier-II cities are lacking in soft skills.

A MeritTrac study, ‘Beyond Bangalore — The Karnataka Engineering Talent Pool Report’, says the percentage of candidates meeting minimum qualifying criteria for communication and language skills in Bangalore is 37.69% while the figure for the rest of Karnataka stood at 23.48%.

Karnataka had an overall percentage of 30.6%. While there is a lot of difference in numbers, Madan Padaki, co-founder, MeritTrac, a skills assessment firm, opines that it is closer than what was thought to be.

”It basically means that one in 2.5 fresh engineering graduates in Bangalore qualifies for the minimum criteria by the industry while one in four people in cities oputside the state capital is good enough. This is a start which can be built upon by the government and industry,” he adds.

About 8,500 pre-final and final year engineering students in 95 colleges across the state were covered in the study done between May and August this year. The report found that after Bangalore, the Hubli-Dharwad cluster had the second best quaifying percentage at 28.60% while Belguam came third with 28.16%. These were followed by Bellary at 27.42%, Mangaore at 23.40%, Mysore at 20.84% and Gubarga at 14.33%.

The study found, with an estimated 90,000 candidates available in the pre-final and final year engineering in Karnataka, an overall 30.6% for the state translates to a total employable pool of about 27,540 candidates.