“Importance of Soft Skills for Indian Students in Campus Placement Interviews”- Professor M.S.Rao

“It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it and appropriately act on it.” - Stephen Covey

Recently I was invited by an educational institution in India to take feedback from students who attended campus placement of a prestigious Information Technology company.  The students attended the campus placement, and the institution decided to take feedback from both successful and unsuccessful students to improve its placement for the next batch of students.  I agreed to their invitation as I am passionate about students.

Students have been divided into two sections – successful and unsuccessful students. We took inputs from both successful and unsuccessful students to enable others to understand what worked and what did not work during the campus placement.

Students shared that it is essential to practice for aptitude test which includes verbal and reasoning by managing their time properly. They must undertake the aptitude test with speed and accuracy to get into the next round of HR interview. During the HR interview, it is essential to speak with confidence. Apart from hard skills, soft skills are also essential to grab the employment offer.

The IT Company gave its feedback about students as follows: Most students are not good at basic technical skills. Some of them have attitudinal problem. Some students presented negative body language. Most of them lacked communication and soft skills. Additionally, they have very high expectations from employers. They think of adding value to themselves rather than adding value to the company.

Finally, we summarized the feedback as follows after taking inputs from students, faculty, recruiters, soft skills trainers, and educational institutions as follows:

Students must acquire soft skills and prepare thoroughly well in advance to grab the employment offers. They must possess positive and right attitude which is the key to success during employment interview. We are excited that the expectations of the students are rising high. Hence, they must work hard accordingly to grab the employment offers. The educational institution must conduct mock interviews and campus recruitment training (CRT) programs regularly, and well in advance to build confidence among students. The Training and Placement Officer (TPO) in the educational institution must take initiative to bring prestigious companies to the campus to enable students to have more campus placements. The soft skills trainers within the educational institution must find out the needs of students, identify the gaps in their skills, and fill those gaps through training to make them employable and deployable as the industry craves industry-ready employees.

To summarize, there must be an integrated approach among various stakeholders including, students, faculty, soft skills trainers, recruiters and educational institutions to build employability skills among the students to enable them to pass out educational institutions with employment offers.  

“If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum.” - Peter Maxwell Davies

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Professor M.S.Rao, India

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