'Job Ready’ Employees

Organisations prefer recruiting graduates or young employees who can be productive faster.

Though there are close to one lakh job opportunities for freshers in India at the moment, job-ready freshers are more welcome as the employer's investment in terms of time and training are less. Firms are choosy about who they recruit, and prefer taking in those with prior training in domain specific skills like networking, Java, software testing, etc.

If there is an alternate proposition to hire freshers having prior training, they are looked at more favourably. Attributes like communication skills, ability to learn, analytical ability etc. are also taken into consideration.

Below are few options that students can consider to make themselves ‘Job Ready’

Training of Freshers

Recruitment experts say freshers are not always business-ready due to the industry-academia gap, and have to be trained extensively. On an average, IT firms spend Rs60,000, at times even Rs80,000, per fresher for training (domain expertise and soft skills), which includes travel, food, lodging and time of the trainer.

Summer Internships

Few students pursue internships during their summer vacations. These internships provide them first hand experience on real projects and opportunity to work side by side with experienced professionals. If the candidate is performing well, often, the company makes him a job offer after he completes his education.

Course Projects

Many professional courses like engineering involve a semester long project work to be completed by the student. Some organisations float a small part of their major projects and offer student to work on such projects. The project work may involve a significant amount of literature study and utilising resources like laboratories available in academic institutes. Few students get the opportunity to work on projects, adding a significant value to their resume. To some extent, these projects also reduce the gap between academia and industry.

Certification Courses

Private training institutes offer one to six months duration certification courses. These courses are aimed at training the students for particular skills like Computer Aided Design, Tally, SAP, Software programming languages, etc.

Often experience industry professional are invited to train students in these courses.

Soft Skills Training

Soft skills are the non-technical, intangible, personality-specific skills that determine your strengths as a team player, leader, listener, negotiator, and conflict mediator. Soft skills are different from technical skills that appear on your resume i.e. your education, work experience and expertise.

Soft skills are just as good an indicator of job performance as traditional job qualifications or technical skills. Personality measures like conscientiousness and agreeability were equally important predictors of work success as cognitive ability and work accuracy.

Many private training institutes offer specialised courses that training students in these soft skills.