TCS to hire 2,000 science and maths graduates

Chennai: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Asia's largest software company, has decided to accelerate recruitment of science and maths graduates.

The company's confidence in science graduates stems from the success of its pilot programme TCS Ignite, where it put 500 science graduates to a seven-month training programme that includes working on live projects to transform them to software professionals.

During this fiscal TCS will hire and train 2,000 science/maths graduates, said S Ramadorai, CEO and managing director, at a media conference here Tuesday. TCS Ignite is a training programme to upgrade the skillsets of science graduates and equip them to pursue a career in the IT industry. The company has set up a dedicated training centre in Chennai for this programme.

The pilot batch graduates were selected from over 200 colleges spread over nine states. Over 60 per cent of the batch comprised of women belonging to various states including the northeastern states which have not been traditional "talent sourcing destinations" for IT companies, he said.

Over 65 per cent of the pilot batch trainees are first generation graduates in their families and majority of them hail from Tier III cities, Class C towns and villages.

The TCS Ignite trainees are paid salary from the day they are inducted into the training programme. The salary level is around 30 per cent lower than the entry- level pay scale of graduate engineers. Based on their proficiency the trainees are deployed in different operations - ranging from software development to call centres.

According to Ramadorai, TCS Ignite has proved that with right kind of learning methodologies science graduates can be empowered with knowledge and skills relevant for IT sector.

He added the programme shows TCS' commitment to social transformation as TCS Ignite spreads the economic benefits of participating in the IT growth story.

In the initial phase of the training, fundamental concepts of various programming paradigms including Object Oriented Programming are learned by playing with intelligent tutors, developed at leading American universities, that help trainees learn programming and application development, proving that learning can be fun.

The course structure is not only just IT-intensive, but also has a high focus on soft skills, customer-orientation and project management.