This article is specific to India. There is a shortage of good embedded system engineers. There are several reasons for that. Let me try to cover some of them.
- Average academic performance
- Excellent academic performance but Career gap
- Wrong attitude
- Lack of core specific basic skills
- Notice period
- Relocation
- High salary expectations
Tips for hiring process
- On-Campus : This is the best option to get good talents in advance. Most of the service based companies adopt this practice. This requires some sort of agreement for retaining the talent until they provide expected output.
- Freshers : Hiring freshers is bit challenging. Here you will get either average or students with career gap. They may need at least 2-3 months for getting started. It requires significant efforts for getting good embedded candidate with right attitude. If you finalize any candidate, try to get that person on-board at the earliest.
- Experienced : Finding relevant experience with minimum notice period is difficult. Main issue is multiple offers due to long notice period. In some cases, candidate didn’t join even after F2F meeting for offer letter. If you finalize any candidate, try to make that person join at the earliest.
- If you are new to Embedded system hiring, read following to understand candidates better :
Know the background of candidate
1: VLSI is dream job of many ECE students. However they don’t get good resources during Engineering and good companies hire mostly cream students from prestigious institutions. Now MNCs prefer Master degree. Indian Government should make some mandatory guidelines for engineering colleges.
2: Those who go for hardware design , They limit themselves to PCB design and hardware design only . Also demand in hardware was low due to manufacturing outside India. Hardware design engineers, testing and quality professionals must enhance their skills with MCU level bare-metal programming.
3: Many students just prepare for IT because of campus visiting companies. So ideally they have to learn out of syllabus and sometime without interest. Students must focus on their core subjects as well. This will help in their academic performance.
4: Some companies hire good Electronics students but don’t provide core job. They end up in testing & service kind of job . Sometime work as contractor only. If you are not getting proper job profile, you must enhance your skills. Career oriented skills can be different from day to day job.
5: Many students are afraid of coding because they follow high level software development courses and beyond their background. For ex Java . Data structure & Algorithms related courses . In reality, embedded system require smart coding skills with strong debugging capability. Debugging skills can be acquired only with experience.
6: Embedded software is one domain which ECE students can manage by learning only few extra skills. It also requires good efforts and patience. Hardly a bunch of students work in this direction from the beginning.
7: Many ECE students spend years for Govt & GATE preparation. They need time to refresh core subjects.
8: Those who get chance in core field , They keep changing at frequent level for salary hike. Some of them end-up to a cocktail resume .
9: I noticed the internship advertisement by many startup-companies mention too many skills as requirement which is not possible at Engineering level.
10: Unfortunately even after studying 70+ subjects and 10+ online certificates, ECE students don’t get motivation in terms of salary.
11: After getting education from highly qualified professors and global course, Students opt for some training institutes without knowing the background of instructor. Sometime such institutes assign teaching to old students who themselves failed to get embedded job. The outcome can be easily understood.
How can Embedkari help in recruitment process ?
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