My Advice to students and first job seekers: Narayan Murthy, Chief Mentor, Infosys

Mr Murthy, I want you to give advice to first job seekers and students. 1) They should be very disciplined in the process 2) They should be hard working 3) Committed towards their work 4) They should do their assignments properly 5) They should try and understand whatever is thought in the class 6) They should try and apply it to the real life situations 7) They should work out for every problem that was there at the end of the chapter. 8) They should learn to ask more questions I think if they do all of these things, they would be wonderful Rangrut.com: What do you think about the availability of resource in market and what are the challenges Infosys faced while hiring fresher in this recession? Mr. NR Narayana Murthy: I think whenever there is a recession, whenever the economy slows down, the opportunity for job creation in this IT- industry so as against about 500,000 jobs created in the last year it must have been hardly 100,000. Infosys was one of the very few companies that honored every one of them the commitment. Most of the company, they postponed their joining period and I think the youngsters have put into difficulty, there was lot of uncertainty and therefore I would say that whenever there is a slowing down of growth of the economy then job creation automatically slows down. Rangrut.com: We have heard you in various platforms where you discussed about employability among fresher. I see that Infosys has also taken an initiative called campus connect to address this issue. Can you tell us something more about it? Mr. NR Narayana Murthy: Well what we found seven years ago that the graduates that came out of the various engineering colleges in the country perhaps from few IITs and few engineering colleges were mostly not well equipped to handle our requirement. Also the fact that we recruited civil engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, chemical engineers to become software engineers, we had to do two things: One we had to mount a three to four months programme for training these engineers the basics of computer science. Now that programme has become an 8 months programme. Second we have to work closely with the engineering colleges so that non qualifying students could be better equipped to handle the requirement of IT Company. Campus connect is upgrading the knowledge of students coming out from the engineering colleges. Making sure that they understand what's happening in the IT industry, to understand the basics of the IT industry, making sure that they have knowledge of the latest tools and technologies. This is the purpose of campus connect.