No salary hike for freshers in IT industry

Fresh engineering graduates, who are finding it increasingly tough to land a job in India’s $160-billion IT industry with each passing year due to lower levels of hiring, may have to deal with another disappointment this year — their starting salaries are unlikely to see a spike anytime in the near future and will largely remain stagnant at their decade-old levels.

According to human resources heads of top companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro, as well as several recruiters and experts tracking India’s IT industry, India’s largest outsourcing firms are unlikely to revise fresher-level wages, at a time when spending from top customers such as Citigroup and General Electric is declining and IT firms are scrambling to protect their precious margins, amid rising inflation and cross-currency fluctuations.

More worryingly, experts point out, a huge demand-supply imbalance has tilted the odds squarely in favour of the country’s largest software services firms, with only one job available for every five engineers who are graduating from colleges across the country every year.