India Inc wants Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Machine Learning (ML), and . students with skills in artificial intelligence (AI), but these skills are lacking on campuses in times of demand.
“There is this demand-supply mismatch because it takes one year after the demand for a certain skill to join the course. Finding the right fit, says Deloitte’s second annual Campus Workforce Trends Survey.
The study, shared exclusively with Mint, took data from 150+ organizations across industries and 250+ campuses across multiple industries.
IT/ITES sectors were the most sought after campus placements, followed by consumer products and financial services.
There is a demand for big data analytics, fintech and risk analysis, AI, cyber security and product design and engineering, with India Inc digitizing all its processes during the pandemic of the last two years.
But Deloitte notes that the top skills iOS/Android development, digital marketing and market access, materials science/R&D, and financial risk management on campuses prominently represent only partial fulfillment of this demand.
Anubhav Gupta, partner, Deloitte India, said, “While industry-academic partnerships are getting stronger every year, they are not embedded at the curriculum level (some may be, but are not institutionalized yet). “This translates into a long campus corporate orientation program (from three months to more than a year) – sometimes even leading to infant exodus,” he said.
The salary offered in different specializations varies as per the demand in each corporate sector. For example, among MBA specializations, the consulting/services industry offers the highest pay gap for students specializing in banking and financial services and finance, followed by marketing and business analytics. On the other hand, entrepreneurship and family business students are offered the lowest salaries with the FMCG/FMCD industry, followed by the IT/ITES industry.
Instead IT/ITES offers the top pay for the more relevant engineering stream specializations of Data Science and AI, followed by Computer Science. The engineering specialization also attracts a higher pay gap from the consulting/services industry.