Are you a college student studying MCA, BSc or Engineering in India? doesn’t matter whether you are an electronics/electrical/mechanical/chemical/civil engineer, you might be knowing by now that you can get a software job with some efforts.
Your friend or senior or even a relative might have as well given you a brief overview of how to get a software job by now. You are told that all you got to do is register to coaching classes that teach C language or Java or ASP dotNet or SAP. And chances are that you might already have enrolled or completed such an IT course in institutes like NIIT or SSI or Seed Infotech or any other institute famous locally.
Most of the students do the classes seriously for the first week, and slowly get bored as the coaching progresses towards the more complex topics. After crossing a limit of unbearably never ending theory, few of them discontinue the classes in the middle though they’d paid the fees for complete course.
I’m sure you have few friends who claim being smart; who keep giving unsolicited advices on what to do and what not to do at every twist of life. One such friend is likely to tell you that it is okay to learn a programming language enough to write a program that outputs “Hello World” on screen. And according to your “smart” friend you don’t need to waste your time in programming practice and you can easily “manage” to cheat the interviewer by blabbering theory in an interview.
This is NOT true. IT Interviewers are really smart people. They can accurately test your knowledge and your aptitude skill in brief meeting of 10-15 minutes in the interview. And these guys have enough experience to find out if you are just a “theoretical” swimmer. You can’t smartly manipulate them like you could manipulate the external examiners in viva conducted in semester practical exams.
So, what should you do to get a software job if you are an engineer or graduate from non-computers stream?
Take up the software coaching classes very seriously. Before you jump into action and join some institute, inquire whether the branch of training institute in your locality is good enough. Brand name of the coaching class is not a great indicator to know whether the institute is good enough.
For example if I’m in Chennai city, Tambaram area, and there is a nationally popular institute called XYZ coaching, it is not necessary that their branch in Tambaram is good enough. It is very much possible that T.Nagar branch has got the best faculty. More importantly, the trainers know how to “teach”. Simply blabbering theory about computer programming in broken English is not teaching. A training institute giving to away to students, loads of training “material” weighing 5 kgs is also of no practical benefit.
At the end of the course, you should elementarily be able to compile and execute a program on your own. And be able to convert a real world logic into a working software program.
For example, if I ask you to write a program to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, no ..no.. this program is a standard program readily available in every training material for you to memorize, let us say if I ask you to write a program to convert feet to inches, you should be able to do that. Memorizing a set of frequently asked programs is not the right solution. It can only save your face temporarily in an interview and fetch you job. But you will be embarrassed in future when you are asked to write a program to do some task.
So, don’t be lazy. Join a good training institute. Work hard and learn the practical part of programming before you start appearing for interviews.
About the Author: Sridhar Jammalamadaka is the Editor of Interview Mantra. He's a typically non-typical Software Engineer from Pune, India. He likes entrepreneurship, web technologies and Micro Controller programming. He enjoys playing cricket and piano (but rarely does these activities). Through this website, he wishes to gather a large community of aspiring engineers, entrepreneurs and professionals from all parts of the globe. You can connect with him on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/sridhar.j 
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