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Freshers are always a major chunk of the recruiting plan in the telecom industry. It certainly requires technical graduates with an aptitude for testing to shine in this industry
[/stextbox]Adding to Maveric’s grooming process, he says, “We invest in our people and have a long-term perspective in our interaction with them. Grooming from a scratch is therefore important. A fresher would, after receiving the initial training, be associated with a mentor so that he/she can be guided on the domain, testing and people interaction skills gradually.”
Variety of job roles
Freshers can be absorbed across verticals depending on the business requirements. Talking about the entry-level roles, Khan says, “It can vary from a management trainee to an executive of any vertical existing today in the telecom sector. Freshers can join a business process outsourcing (BPO) unit, knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) unit, sales, marketing, HR, product development, R&D, relationship management, software and hardware engineering depending on their educational background and interests.”
Talking about his experience in the telecom sector, particularly managing enterprise products and customers for the last 16 years, Revuru says, “The biggest challenge I face with fresher engineers is while developing products for enterprise customers, which is an entirely different ball game from perceived ‘cool’ apps development.” He adds, “Though it takes four to six months for an engineer to start being productive, it takes one to two years to really appreciate the challenges and technology in the telecom domain.”
Pay package
Telecom engineers over the years can gain domain knowledge and continue to build their career. The entry barriers in the telecom domain (enterprise) are high.
“This ensures that the number of entrants in this domain is limited and one gets benefittedduring the increasing demand cycle,” says Revuru. “The typical pay package would be anywhere between Rs 500,000 and Rs 800,000 per annum in this domain of the telecom sector,” he adds.
Sharing the typical pay packages in the overall telecom domain, Sharma replies, “It could start from Rs 200,000 per annum to Rs 700,000 offered by premium MNCs for R&D jobs.”
Khan adds “For freshers, it normally starts from Rs 150,000 per annum and can vary widely as per the individual’s personality, caliber, academic and professional qualifictions and the institute’s reputation in the market.”
At Sasken, they offer a pay package of Rs 315,000 CTC including medical and superannuation benefits.George Abraham says, “Entry-level freshers will undergo foundational competency training (three months) and domain hands-on-training (six months). Then they will have opportunities to work on software development and testing in the telecom embedded system domain.”
Challenges faced by recruiters
It is an equally difficult task for recruiers to select and pick students as per their requirement. Most of the times, the volume of the candidates are over-whelming.
Sharma says, “Quality of engineering graduates is a big issue. We see that the success rate of recruitment from most institutions is low. Students lack exposure, technical depth, analytical and logical reasoning. This makes the hiring challenging in spite of a large number of graduates available.”
Parthasarathy says, “The main challenge that we face is getting people to understand that testing and assurance is a viable career and, in fact, some may be better suited to testing than development. Over the years, this problem has become a bit easier as people see success stories of testing stalwarts. We, however, need more stories and role models and better career counselling at college levels.”
