Test Prep in another avatar
We saw this in Test Prep, Test Prep for IIT JEE. The number of seats available in IITs is about 16,000 (JEE Advanced Reservation Criteria 2022: SC, ST, EWS, PwD & OBC-NCL (zollege.in), this includes all the different categories under which seats are allotted. The number of students writing IIT-JEE is about 850000 according to JEE Main 2022: More than 8 lakh 50 thousand aspirants registers for the first attempt — My Exam : EduBlog of ALLEN Career Institute — ALLEN Blog. The percentage of students who do qualify is between 0.5 and 2.5% IIT vs Study in USA | What Should You Choose and Why? (scaleupus.com). With this low rate of intake, where most students do not qualify, what explains the number of students who keep trying and do not look for anything different. It’s probably trying to realize a dream, to be known as being the best, or may even be peer pressure. But one thing is for sure, anyone going through the grind of preparing for these exams, does well in other competitive exams like the State Board.
Since this entire thing is based on emotions and not exactly ROI, this bubble will continue, there seems to be no hint of it ever bursting.
This seems to be now spreading to every competitive exam, where the dream of cracking an entrance will keep pushing an ever-growing set of students to take up a Test Prep.
Let’s see how this mirrors what is happening in the professional world. The world you step into after you graduate and hopefully land a job in the IT sector. There are a few categories here.
The IT sector companies — volume employers, they recruit in lakhs every year as per Top 5 IT companies to hire 2 lakh techies in 2022; see all details here | TechGig and IT Jobs 2022 | Indian IT services created over 500,000 new jobs in FY22 (indiatimes.com). The starting salaries range from about 3 to 5 Lakhs, and based on my experience I can say that after 3 to 4 years, you can say the salaries will be at least 2x of your experience. You can ignore the current madness in the market where some of the IT companies are doing emergency recruitment and are paying higher salary multiples.
The product companies and MNCs — recruit a few thousand each year, here is a most recent search Mnc Jobs In Bangalore — 27440 Mnc Job Vacancies In Bangalore — Naukri.com. The fresher recruitment numbers should also be in the thousands. Apart from the status of working in an MNC, the starting salaries are also higher, and eventually, the salaries that a person working there gets is a 4x to 5x multiple of their tenure of stay there. Google, Amazon, etc may pay much higher.
Start-ups — This is the category where all bets go off. We have companies such as ours which position ourselves between the service companies and product companies, but there are the well-funded ones, that basically sell the bank.
The last two categories of companies are now being targeted by a different kinds of Test Prep start-ups. You will be trained by the employees of the MAANG or FAANG companies, and you can aspire for those huge salaries and status, but you know the number of such vacancies is limited. Including all IT employees, there are around 5 M + employed. So, theoretically, all of these employees can aspire to become part of the high-paying ones. The % of success is about 0.6% if you consider only the open positions.
So, after the Test Prep cycle, now we have another cycle that has begun. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but one thing I can be sure of is that these companies are not solving the supply issue w.r.t Skilled People in the industry as a whole.
