IIT students secure full-time employment and 1-year placement stints
Informatics Institute of Technology (IIT), the pioneer in British higher education in Sri Lanka and the country’s premier IT and Business campus, held the 2019 edition of its annual IIT Careers Day at the BMICH recently.
The IIT Careers Day brings together the cream of Sri Lanka’s ICT as well as several non-ICT organisations, including local blue-chip and multinational companies, and hundreds of IIT undergraduates and graduates to one location. It is organized with the objective of providing an opportunity for the IIT students to interact with these top companies, present themselves for interviews and secure full-time employment or one-year internship. It provides the ideal platform for IIT students to pick and choose the companies that they’d prefer to launch a career in while it allows the companies to interview some of the best IT graduates in the country and employ the candidates best-suited for their various job requirements. 47 companies, including Virtusa, WSO2, 99X, CodeGen, Brandix, Attune, Pearson, PickMe, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) and Sysco Labs, attended this year’s IIT Careers Day, along with over 500 students and past graduates.
“At IIT, we believe in providing our students the much-needed industrial exposure which will help empower them to excel in their career and to take on the challenges of the corporate world. IIT Careers Day creates an ideal opportunity for our students to meet with potential employers and explore the possibilities of either interning or being employed at renowned multinational and local blue-chip companies. This year Careers Day experienced a much larger number of companies participating in the event than the previous years, which also saw an increase in the number of students obtaining industrial placements at renowned organizations. IIT is dedicated to providing our students with the best education possible, and that would not be possible without our close ties with the industry and their continuous endorsement of our institute and the programmes we offer,” Director IIT Prof. Jayantha Wijeyaratne stated.
Naomi Krishnarajah – Dean of IIT commented, “The IIT Careers Day is one of the most important events in our calendar. It brings together our students and the best companies in Sri Lanka under one roof. For companies, it is a wonderful opportunity for them to interact with a wide selection of IIT students. They get to interview multiple candidates and choose whom they want based on their skills, strengths and chosen career path. It’s also an opportunity for them to make known to the students what their company is all about, especially when it comes to the lesser-known names that don’t have the brand recognition of the bigger companies. For students, they get the chance to explore a wider range of companies, get to know what’s out there in today’s job market and which companies would best suit their career goals.”
Expressing his views, a senior official of Virtusa stated, “We’re here to hire some of the top talents from IIT and have already spoken to several promising candidates. IIT graduates are definitely top tier talents and some of our earliest employees have been from IIT. We are looking for talent, potential and great communication skills because at Virtusa, we have a mechanism for training and grooming them to work with clients.”
Another company representative, Mithila Somasiri –Chief Technology Officer of PickMe stated, “We are always on the lookout for fresh talent and IIT CareersDay is a must-visit for us. We have met several interesting candidates who have great communication skill and have done interesting projects. What we look for is what they’ve done, attitude towards work, keenness for new tech and hunger for learning. We have several IIT graduates already working at PickMe with some of them at senior level.”
Suren Nanayakkara – Head of Group Delivery of Brandix Apparel Limited stated, “We believe that all our employees should be multi-skilled especially when it comes to ICT area. IIT has a mix of skills, in both interns and graduates, when it comes to their ability to work with customers, understand their requirements and translate them into software solutions. I see this as a definite advantage IIT graduates have over those from other universities.”
Speaking from a student’s perspective, Kusal Fernando, a final year graduate at IIT stated, “The exposure and confidence I got from my studies and other activities at IIT really helped me during my internship year. It was challenging and exposed me to new things that helped me a great deal in the final year of my degree. It also made me understand that my passion is to combine Business and IT and go into a career in Project Management. I came today to speak to a few of my preferred companies regarding a Project Manager vacancy.”
IIT was established in 1990 as the first private higher education institute that awards reputed British degrees in the field of ICT and Business. IIT is an award-winning campus offering internal postgraduate and undergraduate degrees from the University of Westminster, UK and Robert Gordon University, UK. IIT has played a pivotal role in strengthening the IT and Business sectors in Sri Lanka over the years by producing world-class graduates. These graduates have gone on to become successful entrepreneurs and IT/Business professionals in both local and international corporate and government entities. Since its inception, IIT has produced thousands of graduates who have excelled in hundreds of organisations around the globe.