Cognizant Technology Solutions,  plans to increase salary for entry-level engineering graduates by nearly 18 per cent from next year. This means, the annual entry level salary will cross ₹4 lakh for the first time.

Entry-level salary for graduate engineers had remained between ₹3.30 lakh and ₹3.60 lakh for the last four years.

 “Last year some companies announced an increase of ₹25,000-35,000 but the 18 per cent increase planned by Cognizant is quite significant. However, we are yet hear from the company,” said a placement director of a leading engineering college in Chennai.

The last time Cognizant announced a major increase was in 2016.

With the growing need for digital talent, Cognizant has been reskilling and upskilling its employees. In 2018, it  trained over 1.50 lakh employees on digital skills.

“We have also been paying more to those with premium skills. In line with that, we have decided to increase the compensation of entry-level engineering graduates, as digital technologies have become an integral part of engineering curriculum in institutions from where we recruit talent,” said a spokesperson for Cognizant, which ended 2018 with  2.81 lakh employees of which 1.94 lakh were in India.

Nearly 33 per cent of Cognizant’s revenue comes from digital solutions and have been quite active in hiring from Indian Institute of Technology. In the past few years, Cognizant hired hundreds of students from IITs and National Institute of Technology at entry-level salaries ranging between ₹6.50 lakh and ₹10 lakh per annum.

In the last three years since digital technologies went mainstream, Cognizant had made over 500 offers in IITs, he said. The company’s net headcount addition in the last four quarters was 24,400 (laterals and freshers combined). Sriram S Padmanabhan, Director (Career Center), SRM Institute of Science and Technology, said the recruitment market is bullish for 2020 with the major companies, including Cognizant, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Accenture and IBM giving a positive hiring trend. Some of the companies have also announced plans to visit the campus multiple times to recruit, he said.

“The increase is long over due and they are late to do this. If Indian services companies need to attract quality talent they need to up their entry intake. The Global In-house Centres (GICs) are hiring freshers at higher entry level salary in the ₹5 lakh range. This pressure will continue and in their case they were behind their Indian peers as well,” said A Kamal Karanth, Talent Specialist and Co-founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing firm.

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