Panicker adds, “A lot of scope exists for improvement in terms of what is being provided and what is the need of the market. In colleges, these technologies are taught as part of general engineering. If you talk in terms of management, operations, project management and deployment, that’s where the talent needs to be groomed, as this is the need of the market today. There is certainly a limitation there and curriculum makers need to address that need. Educational institutes are certainly not able to meet the requirements in the market place. Topics like operations and project management cover much wider spectrum than just a few technology terms.”
Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, University of Kerala and University of Calcutta are the premier institutes/universities that offer courses in optoelectronics engineering.
Hands-on experience
Hands-on experience is important to succeed in this field. Sinha says, “If I was a recruiter who had to choose between an electronics engineer with three years of experience in link fibre and a core optoelectronics engineer, I would go for the experienced re-source.”
Pay package
Typically, for a fresher, the pay package depends on the company policy. For R&D kind of jobs, candidates with masters or doctorate degrees are preferred. Their annual pay package may begin from around Rs 500,000 and go up depending on the job profile offered and, of course, technical knowledge of the candidate. For operations and project management roles, the pay package may vary from Rs 400,000 to 500,000. But if you compare the professionals in these two streams over a period of time, you will find R&D professionals making better progress than professionals in operations and project management.
The author is an assistant editor at EFY
