STC India Employment Fair 2005

By D. Vijayalakshmi

STC India Chapter annual conferences used to have an employment booth. However, there was never an exclusive focus on corporates' and job seekers' needs. Today's hiring managers in growing companies would agree to the fact that the industry is in dire need of qualified, competent technical writers. It is not easy to hire a couple of good technical writers that precisely match your company's needs. We do have a multitude of job seekers, but a majority of them may not meet your expectations. The STC India chapter decided to hold an event to create awareness among job seekers. Also, many IT corporates have been supporting STC activities for a long time. It is time to pay them back by helping aspiring technical writers understand the industry requirements better. The Employment Fair 2005 is a product of this intention.

The STC India Employment Fair 2005 was conducted at ITC Windsor Manor Sheraton & Towers in Bangalore on July 2, 2005. Oracle and SAP Labs were the gold sponsors, while Infosys, BEA Systems, and Symphony Services were the silver sponsors of this event.

The event began at 9 A.M. Dr. Bob Hoekstra, CEO of Philips software, inaugurated the event by lighting a lamp. In his inaugural speech, Bob emphasized the need for technical communication in the product development lifecycle. Bob is a writer himself. He also spoke about his passion for writing. He described how our profession plays a crucial role in what they (software engineers) do. Bob's speech was well received by the audience.

After Bob's inaugural address, sponsoring organizations made presentations about their company and job requirements. They also highlighted what their companies have in store for potential employees. Helen Shukla and Prakash represented SAP. Meeta Mehta and Anirban represented Oracle. Anupama Gummaraju represented Infosys, and Sai Kavitha Rajesh represented Symphony Services. Tanvi Malhotra represented BEA systems and Anitha Sadashiv represented TechnoPoint.

After the tea break, Percy (Alfred) made an interesting, interactive presentation on resume and cover letter writing. His session was aptly titled as "Ensuring that your resumes and covering letters do not eliminate you." Percy's presentation received a lot of appreciation.

Before breaking for lunch, the participants, mostly job seekers, thronged the stalls of the sponsoring organizations to know more about the job openings advertised by them. Many participants did not show great interest in having that sumptuous lunch, which is referred to as the oriental menu in the Windsor Manor lingo. After lunch, there was an hour's interaction between job seekers and advertisers. Also, job advertisers took a look at the 125 resumes of job seekers at the resume folder counter. Meanwhile, job seekers were busy noting down the email IDs and telephone numbers of other participating organizations. Besides the sponsors, over 20 organizations participated in this employment fair by displaying their job notices in the form of posters.

Later, there was a panel discussion on the STC India 2005 Salary Survey results. There was a great panel of speakers. The panel had a good mix of senior HR professionals as well as technical documentation managers in the industry. Rajesh Bhola (Manager, Human Resources, Aztec Software, Bangalore), Mridula Venugopal (Manager, Staffing, Hewlett-Packard, Bangalore), H. V. Prashanth Kumar (Manager, Human Resources, EMC, Bangalore), Helen Shukla (Knowledge Manager, SAP Labs, India), Mita Mehta (Resource Manager, Lucent Technologies, Bangalore), and Suhag Shirodkar (Principal, Teclarity). Sandhya Prasad (Technical Communications Manager, Intel) did a fabulous job of moderating the discussion. The salary survey report was shared with the panelists one week before the event. The panel came up with some good suggestions for STC India:

a. Compare salaries and trends to those of other professions. This will help the newbie who needs to decide on a career track.

b. If you must compare with U.S. salaries, compare in terms of buying power or using the basket of goods method. That way, you ensure purchasing power parity.

c. Increase the granularity for the question about ratio of writers to developers. The current ranges are 1-10 (that is, 1 writer for up to 10 developers), 10-30, and so on. Make it up to 10, 11-20, 21-30, and so on. Working with 10 developers is a very different experience from working with 30.

d. Get a better sense of what on-the-job training entails. This would tie in with the current section 18: Source of acquiring core skills. A possible question could be: If you received most of your training on the job, please select what kind of training you received. (Multiple-choice options: Tools, Grammar, and so on�) Was this training formal or informal?

e. Explore technical illustrations a little more.

After the panel discussion, Gururaj closed the event by presenting the vote of thanks. Francis Anthony of EMC did a great job of anchoring the entire event.

Again, job advertisers and job seekers had a chance to interact with each other between 4 P.M. to 5 P.M. At the end, sponsors were extremely happy with the responses they received. "I think you did a great job of organizing the whole thing." - Oracle. "We have short listed some people and collected many resumes. We have a bigger job ahead." - Infosys. "We will support more such activities. Thanks for organizing this." - Symphony Services

The STC India admin council is glad that the event served its intended purpose. The Admin council members are thankful to the sponsoring organizations, participating organizations, salary survey discussion panelists, and volunteers for supporting this event.

Volunteers who contributed to the success of the employment fair: Hemanth Basrur, Francis Anthony, Shobhasri Raghavan, Sanjukta Bhattacharya, and Akash Dubey.

(With input from Gururaj B.S.)

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