Table of Contents
Introduction
An off-campus placement often hits a spike in everyone’s brain, as it not only involves going beyond the four walls but also means exposing to brand new opportunities. It may be over-exhausting for some while a pleasing experience for others.
The reasons to explore this domain can be personal or professional at times depending from candidate to candidate. Yet, there is no hesitation in admitting to the fact that a proper procedure, skillset, and preparation is a must in succeeding this venture of placements.
From the past years, the trend between off-campus and on-campus has made a decent rise while the difference in the numbers has gone smaller and sharper. For this, the credit can be given to websites providing notifications of the opening of different off-campus opportunities and productive social media usage of the candidate. While for the first step in off-campus placements, there are many doors already open, which makes the path different after entering those doors is the preparation, soft skills, and self-confidence.
Want to understand the ideology behind preparation for off-campus placement drives and where lies its advantages. Watch out for this video How To Prepare a Good Resume.
Difference between On-Campus & Off-Campus placements
| On-Campus Placements | Off-Campus Placements |
| In the on-campus placements, we have to admit that campus placements have their own charm in college. Every student wishes to be the first one with a secure job amongst his/her batchmates. | Off-campus placements are a great alternative for those who didn’t exactly find what they were looking for in campus placements. |
| It is a matter of pride for every college student to score a decent job through on-campus placement procedure. | There is a certain aspect of company profile, salary, designation which play a crucial role in off-campus placements. |
| Limited Competition is there | More Exposure |
| It is time saving process | It provides diverse options |
| College rapport plays important role | There is sense of self-satisfaction amongst the candidates |
| Less efforts needed | More scope of developing knowledge |
| Service-Based companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro generally recruit through on-campus placement programs | Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Netflix, Amazon are the most common companies for off campus placements |
Preparation for Off-Campus placements
In terms of technology, various IT firms often open their off-campus drives for many roles like Software Engineer, Quality Assurance Team, Software Development Engineer, Application Developer to name a few of them. There are particular series of rounds that take place in order to select the right candidate.
- Aptitude Test
- Includes the qualitative, quantitative, verbal, coding questions to test the candidate’s intelligence, inquisitiveness, and promptness. For this round practising through mock tests available online for different companies is very good. It allows a candidate to check his or her weak topics and improve upon the same. If the candidate is from a CSE/ IT background then coding questions also hold very much importance.
- Writing a robust, optimised and efficient code within the time is very important. Therefore, practising various problems based on data structures like an array, LinkedList, stack and queues always help at the exam time.
- Group Discussion
- Having a clear perspective and knowledge of recent happenings is a blessing for this round. Never interrupt anyone while he/she is speaking as it denotes impatience.
- Be polite, confident with your views and never let any pause moments occur in between a GD.
- Resume Preparation
- Here unlike on-campus placements, there are no alike candidates being judged together or their college profile and schedules would be the same. Be very well prepared with what all you have written on your resume.
- The resume should be on a single page only.
- Be thorough with your projects and what skills set you have used in them.
- Technical Interview
- Practising a good number of coding questions, be it through earlier questions asked by the same companies over a span of years or on your own.
- Very good knowledge of data structures, time and space complexities are required. For this, you can refer to CodeStudio, Hackerrank, Codechef and Leetcode.
- Leetcode offers comprehensive topic-wise problems that are good to solve in a stipulated time frame. Whereas to excel in competitive programming Codechef, Hackerrank plays a crucial role.
- HR Interview
- Know well about the company, job profile you are applying for and why you are applying for it.
- Be thorough with your resume.
- Comfortable with your strengths and weaknesses and other soft skills.
So, this was a comprehensive procedure one has to witness and experience during off-campus placements. Each level is an elimination round and every bullet point has its own advantages to which the candidate must look upon and prepare their roadmap accordingly.
Building and Expanding your Reach
In this ever-growing world, full of technological aspects and social media platforms, many companies prefer announcing job openings and other internship opportunities through sites like Linkedin, Interhshala, etc.
A sole reason for this change is wide reach for the opening that results in the recruitment of more skilled candidates or in simple terms choosing the best from many diverse options. In order to get yourself updated with all the latest events and which companies are opening what job positions, keep yourself active on above listed social sites and focus on the following aspects:
- Grow connections with people belonging to the same profile/ company that the candidate wishes to appear for the off-campus placement.
- Follow the pages of the companies to know about their recent happenings and what all is there in the news at that very moment.
- Apply for quite a few companies as per your liking so as to increase your chances of shortlisting.
- Keep your LinkedIn profile updated with what all you have done/ achieved in recent times.
- Share your projects or other activities with your network to get yourself noticed.
The above mentioned points are some of the key pointers one should focus on to build and expand their reach. It is good to be updated, and update others about your professional front which will in turn help in the off-campus placement process.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, this trend is not always followed. It majorly depends on company and job profile.
System design, operating systems, computer networks are the other important topics one could be asked questions from.
This round is not compulsory in all companies, some companies like Google include this round in their placements.
It is nowadays a well-maintained follow-up procedure through mails that keeps the candidate updated whether he or she has cleared the rounds or what will be the forthcoming process to be followed.
Yes, one can apply for both on-campus and off-campus drives unless it’s listed for a specific company if the candidate is hired or rejected then re-application cannot be done.
Conclusion
So this was all about how to prepare for off-campus placement opportunities, what roadmap should be followed and which materials are denet enough to be referred to. At the end, the moment of interview or test and the way the candidate conducts himself or herself plays a pivotal role.
A confident, clear, and prepared person will always have an upper edge over others and will surely leave his or her mark. Off-campus placements can be cumbersome and hectic at times but it has its own advantages over the on-campus placements in terms of getting as per your desire, interest, and proficiency. Go ahead and ace top company interviews and also make yourself engaged with the active placement cell of Coding Ninjas for experiencing an expert journey.
In order to get more insight about what all things to focus on in an off-campus placement drive visit here.
By Sonali Gupta
