recession times

Companies have been doing well at good times and at bad times. Recession - the common word heard today is the lean period that companies are facing doe to macro economic situation. Every engineer when he enters a company wishes that he would have a tremendous career in and out with the employer giving him a way to design his roadmap towards building a stable career. But due to recession many engineers have been facing the hard time either to face a pink slip or to have an ambiguous time where companies take some crucial decisions and employees fall prey to these situations.
It is not fault of the ordinary engineer who puts his full-fledged effort to get a product into the market. Stiff competition between products has resulted in early time to market situation between companies. Today the tier-1 companies face this early-time-to-market situation in cycles to beat the competitors to reach the end your to lure him to by the product for company success. However during recession time it is to be noted that the end use would be not much interested to buy the product for all the buying capacity itself has been hit to a low. As the sales of a perticular product decrease, it hugely effects the revenue of the quarter for the particular tier-1 company resulting it not to give a project or a design contract to its vendors thus resulting in loss of the market for tier-2 companies. This cycle continues till the service providers and reaches finally to the job market where the jobs being either freezed or the companies going to the way to show pink slips like the referree of a football match to its football players.
However the engineers who face pink slips have to face a tough situation - reaon? they donot have a immediate job in hand or they cannot decide what to do next. Engineers having joined as freshers are at tremendous confusion today as they are at start of building a wall with bricks. However the persons over 2 years to 5 years experience who are building their career at earlier stages have a chance to take up a career or to go to a higher education. It is seen that 90% of this category is continuing to try for a new job during recession. It is easy for them to change the career path since a person takes atleast 5 to 6 years to capture a proper skillset and dmain. The employers today assess the engineers as Software Ready or Domain Ready or Program Ready based on requirements. and all these 2 to 5 year esperience category fall in the line of Software Ready category and it easy for them to change their path during this time. Engineers above 6 years till 8 to 9 years are expected to be specialists taking a lead role for one or multiple categories. This category needs to be extremely careful if they intend to change their career since they are now domain ready specialists, companies would expect them to be expert in one or more domains. Additional responsibility of leading a team or technically helping a team is being considered as a added advantage. Engineers above 9 years of experience till 15 years are in the category of managers or architects who are the persons most affected by this recession. Since the oppurtunities are very lean for this category, there is a wait time demanded for each of this category to be choosy to find a oppurtunity in the current situation. Whatever experience level may be it depends on what kind of career path the engineer takes and what decision he intends to take during the recession.
The recession alltime is hitting the market, there are companies today which inspite of this lean period are hiring. It is to no one’s suprise that today most of the companies are very much careful to choose a person for a particular job. Be it a Multimedia engineer or be it a Linux developer, there is a stiff competition among the crowd to appear for a particular interview. Not to blame the consultants, they always do their job right when a job oppurtunity is opened, each consultant is ready and right up rolling his sleeves to capture the finest brains of the industry to his client and is like a feilder on a cricket ground. Today’s consultants remind me of the feilders like Jhonty Rhodes of SA and Md Azaruddin of India who have been best feilders of cricket times. Once you upload your CV on a premium job portal, wait and watch until atleast 8 to 10 consultants reach you with openings for same post for the same client. The tag-lines like “your CV is now shortlisted” may lure you to read the content until you finally notice after reading the content of the mail, the mail has been sent to a list (hige and fat) of so called un-disclosed-receiptents. You are now prey to these emails. One good thing is that whatever the tagline may be, the requirement reaches you on a First-Come-First-Serve basis based on which consultant would have made a contract first with his client. Now so as our job market is getting close by a niche group of engineers, so the market is also getting feilded by a niche group of consultants. For them it is a business and for us it is a job requirement.
In India, I can surely say that the recession has minimal impact on the job requests. For a set of keywords on the internet for a domain, you can find atleast 10 to 12 requirement descriptions making you realize all roads lead to rome - for the same requirement with only one company. However since several companies have been hiring, it is OK to see that you have so many requirements on the place. But it is quite important for one to hold his compass and map at this time of journey in turbulent wheather. The person with right skillset is always chosen for a right job but a kind of patience and restrain is required at these difficult times. As many companies are hiring in this season, we can hope that persons having seen pink slips would surely succeed the search of jobs in this time. Again sticking on the same career path of his expertise gives him more value during recession than changing a careerpath at the time of recession due to fear or assuming the grass on other side is greener.