Others will take jobs well below their technical qualifications in a market where there are few jobs for India's overflowing technical talent pool.
Beset by a flood of institutes (offering a varying degree of education) and a shrinking market for their skills, India's engineers are struggling to subsist in an extremely challenging market.
According to data from AICTE, the regulator for technical education in India, there were 1,511 engineering colleges across India, graduating over 550,000 students back in 2006-07.
Fuelled by fast growth, especially in the $110 billion outsourcing market, a raft of new colleges sprung up -- since then, the number of colleges and graduates have doubled.
The job market has failed to keep up with them pace.
This muddled equation is now showing signs of social and economic strain across the country.
Frustrated engineers are taking jobs for which they are overqualified and, therefore, underpaid.
Hiring is slowing down because recruiters are changing their strategy.
"The world of work is evolving... employers increasingly don't care what you know, they focus on what you can do with that knowledge."
While dozens of new institutes have been established in the past six or eight years, he claims that over a third of them are empty and perhaps they are "worth more dead (for the real estate they sit on) than alive."
A global economic slowdown may have only worsened what is already a bad problem, say others such as Amit Bansal, co-founder of Purple Leap, a skills assessment firm, which routinely gauges the capabilities of students across these institutes.
"Even without this slowdown, there are a large number of students who won't get a job," he says.
Bansal estimates that, at best, there are 150,000-200,000 jobs generated annually in the Indian economy and far too many engineers attacking this labour pool.
Source from : A.Chaturvedi & R.Sachitanand
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