Background:

The outbreak of COVID 19 prompted the closure of all educational institutes starting from primary to professional education. According to UNESCO monitoring, 188 countries have implemented nationwide closure and 5 have implemented local closure, impacting about 99.4% of the world's student population..

Impact on Recruitment:

On 24th March'20, India faced first round of lockdown and all the businesses were asked to shut down their operations except those who are engaged in essential products/services. This decision not only impacted the job scenarios of existing employees but also the fresh recruitments.
Present scenario is like where all the students of UG & PG have gone to their homes and are locked down there only. All the placement related activities have been out on hold by all the companies and colleges are shut and companies are operating from home. As most of the projects are put on hold, companies have also put their recruitments on hold. Considering the existing severity of the pandemic, it seems that even in near future, companies are not going to open recruitment and there is going to be major dip in fresh hiring of UG & PG students.

The economic condition is getting from bad to worse across the globe and it will have direct impact on fresh recruitments. This is the filtering phase. The students who are not having any unique skill set are going to be filtered.

Similarly all the products and services which are of general in nature are going to be filtered after this pandemic is going to be over. Therefore all the students are recommended to use this lockdown period very effectively and efficiently and they should focus on developing some specific skill sets in order to create their demand in the highly competitive environment.

Earlier the students who were possessing general skill sets were also consumed by the corporate world but in coming times, situation is not going to be same. Every corporate is going to have pressure to increase its top line revenue but at the same time they need to keep check on their expenses too.

In my opinion, I believe that below mentioned skills are going to be in demand:

1. Emotional intelligence
2. Career counselling
3. Life style coaching
4. Communication
5. Public speaking skills
6. Web development
7. App development
8. Digital marketing
9. Digital designing
10. Content writing
11. Quality testing
12. Online training platforms

This is the high time for students to prepare themselves for the period after lockdown. They have no other option but to prepare themselves not only technically but also psychologically. At the moment there is negativity everywhere and if students are going to consume this negativity during this period, it would be very difficult for them to cope up with the new world full of negativity. They will have to develop their EQ along with skill sets mentioned earlier.

• Anant Agrawal