Engineering colleges begin to stare at uncertain hiring

Rise of automation, uncertain market conditions may lead to lower hiring at IT service firms

- Pratishtha Bagai & Jas Bardia

The country’s |.3 million engineering college graduates are eyeing fewer jobs in IT-related roles at large companies, including homegrown software services firms, because of the rise of automation and uncertain market conditions.

According to at least five placement heads of the country’s top universities, IT services companies, including Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, Infosys Ltd, and HCL Technologies Ltd, and the back-end tech centres of large multinational companies, are expected to hire fewer college students for the batch of 2026, as compared with last year.

For IT services companies, this would be a third successive year of lower hiring from campuses as they now shift their gaze to talent with specialised skills in artificial intelligence, cloud and data analytics. This implies higher competition among engineering graduates, who will have to prove their mettle beyond coding and application development, a skill long seen as the gateway to a job at an IT outsourcer.

At least one placement officer stated that much of the decline in hiring could be attributed to automation and companies engaging multiple IT vendors, which reduces the need for IT outsourcers to hire graduates in bulk to service projects.