Saturday, June 15, 2013

What are the employability skills required for an entry level engineer in an IT Industry (atleast in India)?



I was once asked a question "What are the employability skills required for an entry level engineer in an IT Industry (in India)?" by someone .


I can probably talk about the below skills with little more confidence now, as its been almost 3 years for me in the IT industry. Here goes nothing..

1. One needs to be open minded to learn new things.
2. Adaptability is also very important as not all new joinees get the kind of work they wish for . For e.g., i have seen Computer Science and Engineering(CSE) graduates getting roles of testers and Electronics stream graduates getting roles of developers. This mostly is a result of an element of luck/fate. If one believes in their potential, no matter what they get, they definitely can get their dream role, but some times, they have to work towards it by changing companies or changing projects within the same company after a period of time(lot of other factors come into play for this transition to take place, but there's definitely hope).
3. Hard work and focus is very much required as one needs to learn from seniors or from peers how those folks are approaching a problem so that next time they should be able to do it by themselves without asking anybody else. There is no fixed way to going about this, but what one needs to learn is how to generalize the way one goes about tackling a problem.
4. One needs to be flexible, especially at entry level there is more pressure put on engineers especially as they have to transition from being an employee on probation to a permanent employee.
5. Sincerity, Humbleness and willingness to help others in case one knows something also helps when you work in a team. These qualities are a testimony of the potential leader that one can be going forward after gaining sufficient technical knowledge to handle projects.


I'm grateful to my seniors in my company, because of whose support/guidance I have reached this far.


I thought the above is worth sharing, given that I had answered this question for someone. I would be glad if somebody at the entry level actually finds this useful. If you relate to this post, or if you feel there are any additional factors that can help one being successful at the entry level, please feel free to share your experience through comments to this post.


Thank you.