For the first time, technology giant Apple has decided to hire students from India's premier engineering colleges.
"We are elated that Apple has decided to come for our campus placements this year. We are not sure of the kind of profiles that the company will be offering. However, it will provide an opportunity to the graduating students to showcase their skills before representatives of the firm," TV Devi Prasad, head of placements at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, told TOI.
Prasad added that the placements are likely to be for Apple's Hyderabad and Bengaluru facilities. In February, the government of Karnataka had announced Apple's proposal to start manufacturing operations in Bengaluru. Following that, the company has started initial production of its iPhone SE model in Bengaluru.
Apart from the US-based the premium gadget maker, other big companies that have registered with IIITH for the hiring process are Microsoft, Google and Philips. Over 350 students from BTech, BE, MTech and MSc (research) programs from the institute have so far registered for the placement drive, which is scheduled to start from the beginning of December.
"The companies will be holding technical interviews in which students who are well acquainted with Python (a computing language) will be preferred. Majority of them are offering jobs for product development and research and development profiles," Prasad said.
College management told TOI that there has been an increasing demand in hiring for artificial intelligence (AI), data science, automation and deep learning this placement season.
"The requirement for hardware engineers is high this year with many companies looking forward to hiring students with knowledge in an application-specific integrated circuit and design verification. There is also high demand for students who have knowledge into 2D-3D graphic in mobile communication," said Prasad.
Recently, Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice-president, had said, "At the Apple level, India is an incredible opportunity... because what we're seeing is huge advancements in digitisation, bypassing older technologies to newer technologies and we think that we have a really great product that can help move things even faster."
"And that's the reason I'm here, that's the reason (CEO) Tim (Cook) came here before. That's the reason why Tim will be back and I will be back. We view this as a very long-term opportunity but with very short-term gains that we can have here," he added.
In June, it was reported that big technology firms like Microsoft, LinkedIn, Oracle, Facebook and Google are planning to increase their staff in India. The US-based firms are seeking Indian engineers as India is a hotbed for experimentation in digital technologies.
