Being a good techie is not enough. Prepare for the job hunt.

Another academic year is going to end & I'm sure, after this, like many other IT students, you are also aspiring to get a nice job in a multi-national IT company. But are you prepared enough? You might say, "well, I've sound technical knowledge. I know c & an oop language like c++ or Java or have done a project on .Net or J2EE. That's gonna be more than enough as a reason to crack it.What else do I need?" Well, if that's so, you are mistaken like many more. It's true that technical knowledge is important indeed & it has no replacement either. But unfortunately it's not always the foremost factor to consider you as a potential candidate to be selected. You therefore, will often find students with good academic qualifications, rejected from campusing. A very common reason for that is weakness in English or communication skills.

In countries like India, where English is a non-native language, a vast majority of students are found, to be weak in English. Of the remaining, who know it well, a countable portion of them, don't have adequate fluency while speaking. This is a major drawback for any job aspirant who wants to work in a good MNC.

Think rationally. Any IT student, who is familiar with the selection procedure of different companies, will find, that the first round of selection is aptitude test. Here, you have to answer questions on maths, data interpretation & English. If you go through the question papers of different leading IT companies, you will get an idea of the quality of questions. Most of the students find the maths & data interpretation questions easy & that's not because the examinees are engineers,but rather the question are of class 10-12 standard. But only few give the same opinion about the English section. Unfortunately, though ignored by most of the students, this is , in fact is 'the section' that decides the winners of the test often. Few top IT companies don't even have a technical round in their selection procedure. That might explain how important is your technical knowledge for campusing.

So does that mean, all your hard work, all that you have learnt, worth nothing? Not really. Because, remember, hard work always pay off. Though your technical skills may not be the only factor to get a job , it's certainly a prime factor to survive on your job & make no mistake, it's not that easy.

Following the recession period,this year, the recruitment drives has started lately on the final semester,unlike previous years, when the recruitment used to start from the sixth semester of the engineering courses . So this year companies are expected to do a lot of off-campus recruitment, where this sort of traits could be a trump card of yours. So besides sharpening your technical knowledge, do take a good care of your communication skills & have a happy job hunt.