IITs end first week of placements on a high note, beating last year's show

IIT Kharagpur gets more than 1,000 job offers in a record five days, with 144 companies visiting the campus till Dec 5

The recruitment season at the older Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) began on a high note in the very first week of the final placement process that kicked off on Sunday, December 1.

IIT Kharagpur (KGP), for instance, received more than 1,000 job offers in a record five days, with a total of 144 companies visiting the campus till December 5.

These include more than 280 pre-placement offers (PPOs) and 19 from public sector units (PSUs). The total number of offer made to IIT KGP students by December 6 stood at 1,119.

According to G P Raja Sekhar, chairman, career development centre (CDC) at IIT Kharagpur and head of All IITs Placement Committee (AIPC), this has been the fastest 1,000 offers till date and, in fact, a day ahead of last year.

IIT Delhi saw job offers cross the 750 mark in the first five days of placement. Of the total 782 job offers made, 767 were domestic offers and 15 were international. "This year, our optimism about the positive steady trend of placements is going well and by the end of this placement season, we are hopeful of breaking all previous year records," said S. Dharmaraja, Head, Office of Career Services, IIT Delhi.

IIT Delhi students across streams are receiving good offers. Some of the marquee recruiters, who have made domestic job offers to students include Microsoft, with 30 offers including two international offers, Societe Generale (13), Mastercard (11), and Standard Chartered (10). International offers have been made by major players like TSMC Taiwan, Microsoft, Denso Japan, Uber, and Fast Retailing.

At IIT Madras, including the accepted pre-placement offers (PPOs), some 848 students have already been placed at the end of phase-I placements for the 2019-20 academic year. This is marginally more than last year (2018-19) when 844 students had been placed at the end of phase-I. Made by around 184 companies, these include 34 international offers from 17 companies.

Of the 34 international offers made in the first phase, 17 came from Micron Technologies for its Singapore office, apart from offers from other major international recruiters such as ANZ, Cohesity, Deskera, Ebara Corporation, MediaTek, Salesforce, Threesides and Uber.

"The phase-I placement process at IIT Madras has once again been strong. We are optimistic of building on these numbers in the second phase of our placement process. We have started preparations focussing on the education sector for phase-II placements," said Manu Santhanam and C S Shankar Ram, Advisors (Placement), IIT Madras.

In terms of sectors, core led the pack in the first week of placements at IITs. At the end of its first phase of placements, IIT Madras saw core and R&D make 43 per cent of total offers, followed by Analytics/Finance/Consulting at 31 per cent, and Information Technology (IT) at 23 per cent, among others.

At 28 per cent, core sector made the highest amount of offers at IIT Delhi, followed by IT (26 per cent), Analytics (14 per cent), Consulting (eight per cent), Management (eight per cent), and finance (three per cent), among others.

Prominent recruiters at IIT KGP till December 6 included American Express, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Google, ITC, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Sony, Accenture Japan, Adobe, Honeywell, Samsung Research Institute, CISCO, HSBC, Amazon India, Rolls Royce, Uber, and Paypal, among others including international offers.