Now, HCL Tech is looking for 12th-pass 'IT Engineers'

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26 Aug, 2025 12:21

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Now, to flaunt a job title of software engineer, you may not require an engineering degree. HCL Tech is offering to make software engineers out of students who have cleared their higher secondary exams (twelfth standard or junior college) with 85 percent marks.

HCL is looking to hire 100 such students from Chennai under its Tech Bee Programme, which aims to provide employment to students from rural India. Under the programme, students will get classroom training for nine months and on-the-job training for three months. According to reports, students will get a stipend of Rs 10,000 per month in the first year to work in one of the many divisions at HCL Tech.

Through the Tech Bee initiative, the company says, the Early Career Program’s focus is to provide employment-oriented training to candidate right after class XII for jobs in HCL. In response to a query from Moneycontrol, the company said the program has been devised to leverage the demographic dividend in rural India.

India’s technology companies are looking at multiple levers to bring down costs as clients drive a hard bargain on legacy tech spending. And the fastest way of lowering costs is bring down the age and work experience of employees. It may be recalled that some of the larger IT companies are in the process of weeding out more experienced employees and hiring younger and less expensive employees with the same skills.

In IT parlance, this is termed as the “bulge mix”. Employees of some large IT companies claim that the management is looking at lowering the bulge mix to improve profitability. Other than the IT architects, most of the work done by India’s vast army of engineers is low end. Several engineers are employed by large corporations to do repetitive and mundane tasks like filling log sheets and generating tickets. Engineers are even employed in business process outsourcing functions. Given that clients are pressurizing Indian vendors to reduce costs, Indian companies are not keen to hire graduates from engineering institutes for low end jobs.

This move will have repercussions on India’s educational system as well. Hundreds of engineering colleges have sprung up over the last two decades to feed India’s USD 150-billion software industry. With companies looking to hire junior college students, vast number of engineers that these institutes produce will become even more unemployable.

India produces 800,000 engineering graduates a year. Other than India’s IT sector, few sectors have created enough jobs to absorb these engineers. India also produces 12 million graduates a year.  With the services sector slowing down over the last four years, India is staring at a jobs crisis in the coming years as its main jobs engine starts to sputter.