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Starting today, Business Line will present a fortnightly analysis of job offers in the IT industry. Information on jobs on offer will be collated from various sources so that readers would have at one place, an overview of employment trends in this industry.

THIS week Satyam Computer Services has said that it wants consultants for its SAP practice. They would be product specialists with a new dimension and having experience between 8 and 10 years in SAP consulting, "coupled with hands on experience in APO, BIW and CRM. (Advance planning and optimisation, business information warehouse and customer relationship management.)

A spokesperson for Satyam's HR department told Business Line that such recruitments were not related to a project and that the demand for such professionals was always there. Satyam has grown from about 600 SAP consultants in March 2002 to about 800 now and estimates its SAP staff strength at 1,200 by March next year.

Asked to comment on salaries being offered, he said, "It is typically a lakh of rupees added to the salary for every additional year of experience." That means, an applicant with five years' experience could command an annual salary of Rs 5 lakh. Above five years experience, "it is upwardly negotiable in favour of the applicants." He declined to comment on the average hike that the company gave last year.

Asked about the rate of attrition (i.e. number of people leaving the organisation as a percentage of the total number of employees), he said, "Attrition has been less than 10 per cent since the time this practice came into being."

Now, what does Satyam offer as a differentiator compared to the competition? "Projects that we have are multi-country and multi-domain." In other words, specialists for this assignment would have the opportunity to work in quite a few places within India and elsewhere. Also, they could get to choose from among the several domains on offer - such as auto, retail, finance and the like.

Interestingly, he observed that not too many people shifted from one domain to another, such as from auto to pharmaceuticals.

Asked if the fear of starting from the bottom again prevented such movement, he replied in the negative and added, "Positions in consulting are technology-specific and not domain-specific. Once people find their fit, they feel comfortable." Satyam's SAP practice, he said, has a bench of 25 per cent.

Accel Technologies is the other company looking out for software folks this week. They want project managers (three positions with more than 6 years of experience), project leaders (five positions with more than 4 years of experience) and business development managers (two with at least 3 years of experience).

The company is into embedded systems and VLSI (very large scale integration) design.

Mr Suresh Pillai, Director-Operations, Accel Tech, told Business Line, "In these areas, there is a big gap with demand for professionals being far higher than their supply."

Attrition rates are high in this area, hovering between 20 and 30 per cent among engineers who have between 12 and 18 months of experience. So, "we are always on the lookout for buffer stocks".

He said that placement agents met most of the requirements but players in this domain would have to look out in the open market at least once in six months.

Asked how applicants could come to prefer Accel Tech over others, he said, "We have selected a few verticals like kiosks, point of sale, accounting and finance systems and the like. We offer end-to-end solution in these verticals. Hence, engineers will get to work in all phases of the product development cycle (PDC)." This was essential for an exponential growth in their career, he reasoned.

He declined comment on salaries citing confidentiality.

The average salary hike across the board in Accel Tech last year was about 15 per cent on a cost-to-company (CTC) basis, he said.

He added that the salary levels for entry-level engineers had come down since the company gets numerous applications from engineers with a master's degree in the US or in Singapore, coupled with the availability of fresh engineers in the marketplace. However, he said, "The salary for skilled engineers are high, especially in VLSI and embedded systems."

He revealed that the Accel group had 150 software engineers with 18 in the area of VLSI and embedded systems. "We want to build a team of 30 engineers in VLSI Design and Embedded Systems area by March 2004."

"These openings are not against any specific projects, but against products that we plan to develop and market by December 2003. We have already committed orders in hand for these products. Clients are multi-national companies in banking and financing sectors and /or leading companies in utility services," he added.

Commenting on the changes in skills requirement he has seen in the last 3-4 years, he said, "Previously, in embedded systems, companies were able to clearly define and divide the job between hardware and software." Of late, this line has thinned, especially in `system on a chip (SOC)' designs. So there will be a demand for engineers with a mix of hardware and software skills.

And, "the speed of execution in embedded systems is also increasing, forcing digital design engineers to focus more on high speed system design issues, closer to analog design. So here, too, we may expect a mixed skill set - analog and digital design expertise."

SG Software, the IT arm of Societe Generale wants, Quality Managers (6 years' experience), Technical Analysts (6-8 years) and Test Leads (3 years). However, an HR spokesperson declined comment on the openings.

Infosys too is on the lookout for Project Managers and Programmer Analysts. But details on the scope of the assignment are still awaited from the company's HR department.

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