Boom time for IITs: Job offers continue to pour

Pre-placement offers at Indian Institutes of Technology continue to pour in.

As the IITs prepare for the final placement process beginning December, companies are making pre-placement offers for final-year students.

IIT Madras has bagged 15 PPOs across departments but still expects over 10 offers. "Pre-placement offers from sectors like FMCG, IT and oil & gas have already been made.

However, we are expecting 10 more PPOs to come over the next one week, including offers from manufacturing and finance sectors," said Anurag Nallapati, student placement in-charge at IIT Madras.

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The buoyant pre-placement scenario is visible through Singapore-based Barclays Bank offering a salary package higher than last year's best (Rs 22 lakh or Rs 2.2 million) for one of the candidates.

"Since PPOs are continuing to pour in, we expect better offers in the coming days. The response from companies, especially from the core engineering sectors and banking & IT, have been very good.

"Things are definitely looking brighter than last year," Sunil Srivastava, head of training and placement, IIT Kharagpur had told Business Standard earlier.

The institute received over 40 PPOs.

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Response from firms across sectors has also improved this year as far as PPOs are concerned.

"While PPOs should have been over by now, firms are still coming in and that is a good sign.

"The response from firms has been very good with over 220 firms registering this year with the institute.

Last year the figure was 130 companies. Also, regular sectors from the pre-2008 times including IT and finance are back to the campuses this year," Nallapati added.

Over 160 companies have visited IIT Kharagpur and the institute expects the number to rise close to 200.

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The improved scenario for PPOs is significant because IITs and other higher education institutions had hit a low in placement offers during the global financial crisis in the last couple of years.

So much so, that while students at some of the IITs had received regret letters from companies, a few major banking and finance recruiters did not participate in the placements, resulting in a dip in salary offers.

While in 2008, 3,031 students from seven IITs were recruited by MNCs through campus placements, in 2009 the number had dipped to 1,606.