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

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.