The engineering placement season has just come to an end. Over 350,000 graduates from 1,356 engineering colleges have chosen their careers. There is enough evidence to suggest that their job preferences are vastly different from those of their seniors even two to four years ago. Like earlier, many are heading towards the sprawling campuses of the country’s flourishing information technology (IT) companies. But the number of engineers making their way to the shop floors in pursuit of a hard-core engineering vocation is perhaps the highest ever in many years.

ENGINEERS@WORK: Or, more aptly, engineers at work in a manufacturing concern, in this case, Forbes Marshall

Here is one example. In the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, 91 per cent of MTech students have chosen manufacturing jobs. “Even 73 per cent of mechanical engineering students have opted for hard-core engineering jobs,” says Subash Babu, professor-in-charge (placements), IIT Bombay. It is a similar story in many other premier and second-rung institutions.

This February, Tata Motors advertised for about 50 vacancies. Many were in areas like manufacturing and maintenance, production engineering, vendor development, machine purchase, process planning, etc. Professionals with 3-15 years experience were invited to apply. The response hit Tata Motors like a tsunami. Over 50,000 people responded to the advertisements! The HR department had to mount a countrywide screening exercise on an unprecedented scale. Even BPO companies would struggle to cope with such a deluge.

The tide is turning, say recruitment agencies. “A manufacturing job would draw only about 50 applications 3-4 years ago. Today, that number has more than doubled,” says Swapnil Tripathi, associate vice-president, Naukri.com.

Are these signs of a resurgence of engineering and manufacturing careers?

The question is as compelling as the backdrop against which it is being posed. Less than a decade ago, Indian manufacturing was at its nadir. Global competition hit home. Growth slowed, margins dropped and investments virtually dried up. (See ‘Crisis Point’, BW, 9 October 2000).

How Much Do They Pay?

Since then, Indian manufacturing has made a strong comeback. It has registered double-digit growth rates for the better part of this decade and is likely to grow by 9 per cent this year. Manufacturing GDP is likely to close 2005-06 at almost Rs 5,00,000 crore — it has almost doubled in six years.

In these six years, India has become a hot destination for manufactured outsourcing, especially in sectors like auto components and engineered products. Indian industry clawed back by fighting costs. It found favour with global economies that looked to India as a low-cost country (LCC). That was the first wave of the manufacturing revival.

Now the second wave is taking shape. This time around, Indian industry cannot compete on costs alone. It has to add innovation to the very core of its competitive strengths.

And innovation has to originate from inspired designers, engineers, workers and managers on the shop floor. That is why plenty of good engineers are so important for this sector. It is talent that will shape the contours of the second wave of Indian manufacturing.

One word of caution, though. This is not to imply that manufacturing companies are easily finding all the engineers they need. Far from it; there is still a huge shortage of talent. “At the moment, talent is the manufacturing sector’s biggest challenge,” says Arindam Bhattacharya, director, Boston Consulting Group. Not capital, not capacity, not competition. It is only that the existing supply of engineers is getting excited about shop-floor careers.

Where do companies seek out top-notch talent? In campuses, of course, and on ‘Day One’ of the placement season. But so far, IT companies have monopolised most of the Day One slots. That invariably helps them snag the best talent.

Hot Shop-Floor Jobs

But now there is palpable excitement in manufacturing. And, yielding to changing student preferences, many colleges are rethinking their Day One strategy. “If this continues, from the next year, we may give the Day One slot to manufacturing companies,” says Sushil Thale, placement officer, Fr. C. Rodrigues Institute of Technology (FCRIT), Navi Mumbai. “Several IT companies threaten to boycott us if they are not given the Day One slot. But we are not bothered.” In fact, some colleges like VES Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and PSG College of Technology, one of Coimbatore’s premier institutions, have already given that honour to manufacturing companies.

In Punjab Engineering College, 60 per cent of mechanical engineering students have taken to manufacturing-intensive jobs. “This is a deviation from previous years when as much as 90 per cent of the students preferred IT jobs,” says M.L. Gupta, placement-in-charge, Punjab Engineering College.

The textile hub and foundry city of Coimbatore offers further evidence. In the last couple of years, leading IT companies like Tata Consultancy Services and Cognizant Technologies have set up centres and stepped up hiring. The city is also close to Bangalore and Chennai — two thriving IT hubs. Yet, almost 550 of the 1,100 students of PSG College have taken to core engineering jobs. “We have seen a 10 per cent increase in the number of students taking up engineering jobs compared to the previous year. More and more students are looking forward to working on the shop-floor,” says R. Nadarajan, placement officer. “There is a perceivable change in students’ attitude towards core engineering,” adds C.P. Hariharan, secretary of the placement committee, National Institute of Technology, Calicut (NITC).

What's Exciting About Manufacturing?

Trends in college admissions also point to a surge of excitement in manufacturing careers. Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT), Nagpur, has just raised the number of seats in the BTech Metallurgy programme by 50 per cent. This is in response to a massive recruitment of metallurgy students by the Aditya Birla Group, Bharat Forge and Tata Motors. NITC plans to double the number of seats in engineering streams like chemical, electrical, and electronics. “The government has realised that the manufacturing sector can no longer be ignored if India has to be made a globally competitive nation. And we see the changing scenario in colleges too,” says V. Krishnamurthy, chairman, National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council.

But why are students suddenly excited about engineering jobs? There are several compelling reasons. But at the core, the very nature of shop floor jobs has undergone a radical transformation.

Earlier, engineers were programmed to take a task-based approach. They were measured largely on the quantum of production. For example, how many cars or buses or tonnes of steel they produced. That is now giving way to a problem- or a challenge-based approach. Jobs on the shop floor are no longer about how many units of production you churn out. They are about innovation — in terms of product offerings, process efficiency, value engineering, cost reduction, etc. About 60 per cent of Tata Motors’ employees have already moved away from task-based roles into challenge-based mode. “Innovation is now at the very core of a manufacturing job. The scope for innovation is more in manufacturing jobs than in the services sector. Engineers get excited about innovation. They want to get involved in it,” says Praveen Kadle, executive director (finance & corporate affairs), Tata Motors.

EMPOWERING THE EMPLOYEE: The Single Workman Station of L&T has improved productivity and given its employees a sense of ownership for the final product, believes R.N. Mukhija, president (operations)

That’s why Tata Motors changed the way it runs its shop floors. A typical car or truck plant would have many production units such as an engine shop, a gearbox plant, a press shop, etc. Each would then have smaller units within them. Traditionally, the team members of each unit would only focus on numbers produced. But now, Tata Motors has empowered the teams. Each is responsible for cost, quality, shop maintenance, etc., with deliverables in each. The head of each unit is expected to run it like a mini company within a company. This holistic responsibility excites the team.

This has also created more responsibilities for younger employees. The average age of the employee who heads such units is between 27 and 30 years. Engineers with only five years’ experience can aspire to such responsibilities.

That’s unprecedented in the manufacturing sector. But more and more companies now dare to break conventional practices. They want to increase the excitement in manufacturing jobs. Nothing illustrates this better than Hitori Yatai Seisan or the Single Workman Station, at Larsen & Toubro’s (L&T) electrical engineering division.

The moving assembly line has been a fundamental manufacturing practice. Each worker performs one particular task in the production of a component. There may be a handful, a dozen or even hundreds of workers in a line — but each will have only one task to perform in the entire production process. No individual can take full ownership of the product.

But L&T figured that employees would relish the challenge of complete responsibility for a product. So, it introduced this concept in air circuit breakers. It did away with the assembly line and asked workers to assemble the product fully. The worker now has full ownership — he makes the product from start to finish. Every air circuit breaker also has a serial number — this is as good as branding it with the name of the worker. “Ever since we introduced the concept of the Single Workman Station, our productivity has increased as the employee has a sense of ownership for the final product. This is a great motivation,” says R.N. Mukhija, president (operations), L&T. Such practices are rewriting the very DNA of manufacturing jobs.

Existing jobs are becoming more exciting. Newer and richer job profiles are also emerging. “There is a lot of innovation and a shift of emphasis to research and development (R&D). There are new kinds of jobs being created in the sector,” says Gangapriya Chakraverti, business leader (human capital product solutions), Mercer Human Resource Consulting. The newer jobs are being created in three broad categories: pure research, engineering design and new product development.

Pure Research: Manufacturing companies are spending more on R&D than ever before. A sample of 639 large manufacturing companies spent Rs 3,712.24 crore in R&D during financial year (FY) 2004-05. That’s a substantial increase over the Rs 2,196 crore they spent in FY02.

In some sectors like automobiles, the increase in R&D spends are even more pronounced. The top five automotive companies spent Rs 226.8 crore in research during FY02. Only three years later, this has almost trebled to Rs 661.56 crore.

In simple terms, this means unprecedented increase in amount of engineering research-oriented jobs — at least 20,000 to 30,000, even by conservative estimates.

IN THE THICK OF ACTION: The cubicle of Jay Varadaraj (centre, back row), managing director of Coimbatore-based Elgi equipments, is situated bang in the middle of the company’s shop floor

Take Ashok Leyland’s Advanced Engineering Group (AEG), a cluster of professionals involved in pure research in emerging areas like telematics, alternate propulsion, material sciences, etc. It was started only a few years ago, but the number of engineers working in this and other research-oriented jobs has just doubled from 225 to 450. It will double again to 1,000 engineers in the next 3-4 years. “Our aspiration to grow our research team is limited only by the availability of talent,” says R. Seshasayee, managing director, Ashok Leyland.

Engineering Design: There are two big reasons why the design component in manufacturing jobs is increasing. First, cost pressures have shifted the focus to areas like value engineering. This calls for design skills. Second, most export orders are on an ‘art to part’ basis, where the Indian supplier is also expected to design the product.

Increasingly, design skills are becoming a prerequisite to win new business. L&T’s Rs 1,500-crore electrical engineering division is a good example. It hopes to double revenues in the next three years. But to do that it needs a lot more design engineers. Already, 500 of the division’s 1,800 employees are on the design team. “In the last 2-3 years, the total number of engineers has increased by 20 per cent, but those employed for design-related work has increased by 50 per cent,” says Mukhija.

Similarly, in L&T’s heavy engineering division, 12-15 per cent of employees are devoted to analytical and real-time design. “With clients like Chevron, we are working on how designs can be changed to suit maintainability. Design is driving the growth of manufacturing,” says V. Kotwal, senior executive vice-president, L&T. Global companies not only buy engineered products but also discuss designs for future products.

New Product Development: The success of products like the Indica and Scorpio has helped attract talent. “Our experience is that students actually look forward to joining companies involved in new product development on a grand scale,” says Anand Mahindra, vice-chairman and managing director, Mahindra & Mahindra. “Product development is attractive to engineers because it has won public recognition,” adds Seshasayee. The number of engineers in product development is growing. For example, Tata Motors has about 400-500 people working on new product development.

Though the above examples may suggest that most product development is happening in the auto sector, that is not the case. Take petrol pumps (the machine, not filling stations). L&T first started producing petrol pumps in 1958. But the latest range of pumps is designed to function without any human intervention. It can take payments through credit cards, contact the banks for card verification and then dispense the required quantity of the fuel. This underscores the evolving complexity of product development. Twelve mechanical and eighteen electronics engineers are working on the product.

There are many such initiatives. L&T’s heavy engineering division has just set up a product and technology development group. It plans to treble the strength from 50 to 150 engineers soon.

But across industries, there is an acute shortage of experienced research hands. That is pushing salary levels higher.