It is a very common misconception that there are not many core electronics jobs in the top IT MNCs. Today with rising trends in electronics, automotive and IoT even the IT companies open many vacancies for electronics engineers. With Tech Mahindra being one such IT giant, Srinivas Rambabu – Head, Engineering Talent Acquisition & Special Initiatives, Tech Mahindra and Karthikeyan Natarajan – Global Head, Engineering, IoT & Industry 4.0, Tech Mahindra share their inputs on the hiring trends, Tech Mahindra jobs, skillsets, hiring process, steps to follow and internships at Tech Mahindra with Ankita KS from EFY Group. Excerpts follow..
Q: Is ‘quality talent’ a challenge that embedded and IoT players are going to face in India?
Quality of talent for system integration & architecting is today’s challenge and will be a challenge in the future as well, especially in the areas of IoT architecture, system integration, data analytics, and data modeling, Automation.
Q: What would be your advice to professionals working in electronics, IT sector or even pure embedded sector and eyeing a role in the IoT space? Should they prepare themselves for making a switch? How?
Upskilling or reskilling is the mantra. We are seeing the convergence of Electronics, communications & IT. Hence, the industry demands candidates to understand the overall project targets, while they focus on their key assignment in their specialised areas. Addition of IoT-related skills is mandatory. Every role, be it embedded, IT and electronics have enhancement requirements for IoT.
Q: What would be your advice to the academia–how should they reinvent their curriculum to create techies suitable for the IoT industry?
- Academia should invest in labs & pilot projects. They need to explore working with industries for a paid internship from 5th / 6th semester onwards.
- Training based on System Engineering with LIVE product design and development will enhance students’ capabilities. Academia should collaborate closely with the industry in designing the curriculum from the first year of their engineering education to enhance their technical skills and become a future-ready workforce.
- They need to have specific courses to ensure techies go deep in chosen segments of IoT such as Products (Sensor, Edge Analytics, etc.,), Communications (Cloud, Data acquisition, etc), Consumer segment (UI, Data Analytics, etc.,)
Q: What are the type of roles for which you’re planning to hire? Can you share a brief idea about what these roles entail?
We are looking at talent for all roles right from developers, architects & testers for Automotive electronics & IoT. We are also going to hire for the roles of program managers and business analysts.
Q: Do you have a formal Internship program to train freshers for the industry? If yes, can you share how’s it designed to actually make them industry-ready?
We do consider interns working on live projects, based on the type of projects from the customer and if the relevant conditions are met. We connect with the Institutes (with whom we signed the MoU) on the available positions and the shortlisted candidates as provided by the institutes would be evaluated for basic and relevant knowledge before releasing the offer. We also look at the interests, skillsets & capabilities of the interns before on-boarding them for the projects that would be of 2-3 month duration.
