Navigating through Recession : Actionable Insights for Management and Engineering Graduates looking to build a career in IT

With the ongoing market recession and recent COVID-19 outbreak, a lot of internships have been revoked and full-time offers either rescinded or deferred. The graduating class is at the receiving end, with anxiety building up with each passing day. Having said that, this is not the end – this is yet another passing phase.

To quote my personal example, I graduated in the summer of 2001. Around the same time, the collapse of the dotcom bubble coupled with the 9/11 attacks resulted in the first global recession and the IT industry succumbed to it. The celebrations of campus placements were marred by the news of offer rescinds and defers. My joining kept on getting deferred multiple times and I started working in Feb 2002, instead of June 2001 – and a lot of my batch-mates had their joining deferred by as long as 18-24 months.

Did that mean that we were written off ? No – not at all. We all did survive the recession and were able to settle and build great careers. Did the loss of those 8 months slow down my career growth and pushed me back ? Well, not really. In order to understand this, let us first appreciate the fact that our career is a journey – you plan it like a marathon, and not a sprint. In fact, Can you even plan your career, considering the harsh reality that >95% of our Engineering and Management students probably took on their degrees, not for their love of it, but due to societal pressure or unawareness of their own interests, and these continue to prove to be safe bets for a stable job and financial security.

Hence, Career planning can be considered as an evolutionary journey – so I would not really worry if you do not have your grand 5/10/15/20-year plan. If you already have, that’s great but I would recommend practicing agility around that. While you are in your college studying few courses, you are probably exposed to <10% of the opportunities that exist and are on offer. Once you get into the corporate space and start exploring various domains, functions and technologies that exist – this is when you start to realize what your calling is, and it is absolutely fine for that to be changing over time as you continue to explore yourself – Isn’t that what evolution is all about ?

Let’s talk about using this time available to your advantage, to enable you to position yourself not only as a potential candidate of choice but also build some skills which will help accelerate your journey to compensate for the lost time. Here it is essential to call out that the “soft” skills are as fundamental to a professional as an operating system is to a computer, and it warrants a separate time and space of its own in subsequent blogs.

While there is an ocean of all desirable technologies, domains and skills out there, I propose an outline of very specific fundamental “hard” competencies which I believe, matter the most, particularly in the IT world. Most importantly, execute this with a passion to Learn (and not to just to crack an interview). This will reflect in your self-confidence and set you up for a long- term growth.