Cognizant To Hike Starting Salary For Entry-Level Engineers From 2020
Engineering graduates in June 2020 will see Cognizant offer them Rs 4 lakh per annum as against Rs 3.38 lakh at present.
Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., which has close to two lakh employees in India, will offer a 18 percent higher starting salary to entry-level engineers joining next year, according to industry sources.
Engineering graduates in June 2020 will see the offer made by the U.S.-based company increase from Rs 3.38 lakh per annum to Rs 4 lakh, they said. IT companies are slated to to hold campus placements at engineering colleges in August-September this year.
Confirming the salary hike, a Cognizant spokesperson said the company already offers higher pay packages for employees with “premium” skills in digital technologies.
“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 curricula in progressive institutions from where we recruit talent,” the Cognizant spokesperson said.
With the growing need for digital talent, Cognizant has also been investing in reskilling and upskilling of its employees at scale. “In calendar 2018 alone, we reskilled and upskilled over 1.5 lakh of our employees on digital skills,” the spokesperson said.
The Cognizant spokesperson, however, declined to comment on the number of job offers made at engineering colleges in India.
According to campus placement officers, Cognizant usually hires about 15,000-20,000 freshers on an average every year. Starting salary for graduate engineers is currently around Rs 3.30-3.60 lakh per annum.
Cognizant, which gets about 33 percent of its revenue from digital solutions, has been actively hiring from Indian Institutes of Technology and has made more than 500 offers in IITs across India in the last three years.
The Cognizant salary hike comes at a time when the company has said that as part of a realignment scheme, the “management is currently evaluating various strategies, including additional employee separation programmes”.
“The timing, nature and magnitude of these initiatives are not finalised at this time. As such, we cannot provide realignment charges on a forward-looking basis without unreasonable effort,” Cognizant had said while declaring its March quarter results.