Tough path Ahead for Freshers - Career Talks with Sawan Kumar

Why freshers don't get hired is a question I hear constantly — and the honest answer has nothing to do with a bad economy and everything to do with a gap that three to four years of college quietly built between you and the job market.

Direct Answer: Freshers struggle to get hired because Indian colleges still train students on degree-based syllabuses while private companies and multinationals have shifted entirely to skills-based hiring over the last five to ten years. The mismatch between what a classroom teaches and what an employer needs on day one is enormous. Add the permanent shift to remote work, and companies simply cannot afford the weeks of hand-holding that a zero-practical-exposure hire demands.

The Skills-Degree Mismatch Is Bigger Than Most Freshers Realise

Government companies and PSUs built their hiring around degrees and specific academic credentials — that was the old world. The private companies and multinationals that now dominate hiring do not think that way. They care about what you can produce on day one, not the grade printed on your certificate. The education system has not caught up. The syllabus being taught inside most colleges today does not map to what a company's manager is going to put in front of you in your first week. I have watched this gap widen every year, and it is the single biggest reason freshers send out hundreds of applications and hear nothing back.

Remote Work Removed the Safety Net Freshers Used to Rely On

There used to be a workaround for the practical knowledge gap. A fresher would sit next to a senior, shadow a manager, absorb the workflow over weeks, and gradually become useful. That model depended entirely on physical proximity. When everything moved online — and for most knowledge-work companies it has stayed online — that path closed. Managers are not available full-time on a video call to explain project requirements to someone who is figuring out the basics. Companies tried. I tried. We hired batches of freshers and repeatedly found that the communication gap and the training load were too heavy without a physical office to bridge them. That is not a complaint about freshers — it is a structural problem that you, as a fresher, now have to solve on your own, before you apply.

The Students Who Are Getting Hired Started in Class 12

There is a smaller group of freshers who are not struggling, and the difference is timing. They did not wait until graduation to think about what the industry wanted. They started reading about real workplace requirements while they were still in Class 12. They ran internships alongside their studies. By the time they completed their degree, they had accumulated enough practical exposure and experience that a full-time job offer was almost inevitable. These students arrive at an interview with stories about real work — not just a transcript. The rest — the majority — spent those same three to four years comfortably inside the college system, assuming the degree would do the selling for them. It does not. It never did, and it is even less true now.

Direct Answer: The fastest way to close the hiring gap as a fresher is to start building practical skills before graduation ends, not after. Students who begin internships or skill-based projects in their second or third year of college enter the job market with a measurable advantage over those who wait for campus placements to decide their fate.

My First Day at an Audit Firm Taught Me Everything About Being Unprepared

I want to be specific here because abstract advice is useless. I was preparing for my Chartered Accountancy qualification when I joined my first job — an accounting and audit firm. On day one, we were at a client's site for an audit. I did not know what an arch file was. I did not know what a box file was. I did not know how to open one. I am not embarrassed to say that now, because I was an intern and I had explicitly joined to learn those things. But the critical word there is intern. If I had shown up as a full-time hired employee with a completed degree and not known those things, I would have been finished. An employer paying you 50,000 or one lakh rupees a month is not paying for a learning journey — he is paying for output. The intern framing gives you cover. A degree does not.

You Get Paid Exactly What You Are Worth — Not What You Dream

Colleges do a particular kind of damage when they hold up placement statistics showing 10 lakh, 20 lakh, even 34 lakh per annum packages. Students internalise those numbers as entitlements. They are not. A company pays you when it is confident that deploying your skill set will generate more value than it costs. That is the entire equation. If my skills can help an employer earn 10 crores, I can legitimately ask for one crore in salary. If my skills can help an employer earn one lakh rupees a month, I cannot reasonably ask for more than 10,000 a month. This is not harsh — it is how value exchange works. When we pay a plumber or an electrician even 100 rupees and the work is not done, we lose our minds. Imagine what goes through an employer's head when someone on a one-lakh-per-month salary cannot deliver. The number changes, the frustration is identical. As someone who has trained over 79,000 students globally across 74-plus courses — and hired freshers directly — I can tell you that the candidates who understand this equation walk into interviews differently. They are not asking for charity. They are demonstrating value.

What to Do Today — Not After Your Degree

Stop waiting for the degree to give you permission to prepare. Identify the job role you want — accountant, web developer, designer, it does not matter — and ask yourself one honest question: can I actually do that work to industry standard right now? If the answer is no, you already know your next step. Get online. Digital platforms, professional communities, skills courses, and active companies are all visible and accessible. Start applying for internships. Start building a portfolio of real work. The freshers who send me questions in the comments are not short on intelligence — they are short on practical exposure. That is fixable, but only if you start today. Complaining about the college, the teacher, or the system wastes the one resource you cannot recover: time. Three months of focused preparation cannot undo three wasted years, but it is the fastest path back.

The gap between where most freshers are and where employers need them is real — but it is a skills gap, not a talent gap. Pick one practical skill that your target job requires, build it to a demonstrable standard this week, and get it in front of someone who can validate it.