Why Job Hopping is so common in India?

In India its very common for someone working in a software industry to have changed three companies in three years. The number of jobs available in market is one thing which facilitates it. But still why are Indians not loyal to their companies? Are companies recruiting wrong persons in wrong jobs? No one would agree to that as most of the big companies have elaborate rounds of interviews which screen the candidate at various stages . Still most companies have not been able to come out of this problem and when talking of engineering college grads from so called Top Colleges in India most of them leave their first job within a year of joining.

The problem lies somewhere when a future engineer starts thinking about his engineering career or even before that. As soon as a student leaves 10^th class and enters +2 his journey into a future which wont be guided by his interest begins. He starts preparing for engineering entrance exams without being sure he wants to be a engineer at first place, next comes his engineering branch which is decided by his rank and not by his interest and then it continues with a job he gets where he is not sure what work he would be doing. And though there are strict selection process for selecting engineers the pressure from parents/friends/ego/competition makes many work hard and get into engineering even if they don't like studying it. And so is the case with companies recruiting engineers even if they put all kind of tests to screen out the employees who wont prove to be good. Now from the point of view of a company a good employee is one who would work in the company for a longer period and has the minimum necessary skills required for working there, which most of the times is a non-issue as the work done in most Indian companies can be done by anyone provided he can effectively communicate with everyone in the team. Then why do companies test the engineers for technical skills so vigorously? The reason is studies tell that a person will stay in a job if he is working on something related to his interest field. So companies ask a lot of technical questions to know if the person is really interested in Software or not. Clearly put if you want to be in software industry you should be interested in software and if you are interested in software you should be having a good amount of knowledge of software. That means the testing of technical skills is only to know if the person is really interested in choosing software as a career. But this method does not work so well in India as it would have done outside India as here we can do anything to get money and studying some topics to get a job is not something big for us. Yes some companies have found some innovative solutions to this problem. Like you would be seeing many companies that tell we take people from IITs only, this does not mean the work being done there is very good, but it serves two purposes very nicely. One is IITians hate to work with non-IITians and they feel great when they are working with IITians. They feel they are at a great place and to prove themselves to other IITians they work very hard. HR people understanding this thing either go only for IITians no matter how the job aligns with the person's interest or if the job really needs people with good aptitude. The second way HR managers have found is to recruit people who can do the job but are not all ambitious or come from college where even getting a job is big thing. So they remain faithful to the company and work hard as they got a job they would have never thought of having at first place.

Those who go into IIT or other top colleges after lots of hard work and dreams of achieving big success in life develop a sense of superiority complex which makes them feel they are level above the other normal people who could not perform so well during pre-engineering days. And this makes them believe they should be paid more. And for a engineer whose first wrong choice was either this career or his branch of study makes his next mistake by going for a job where he would be working with IITians but something which wont give him any satisfaction of having accomplished great things. This can lead to more job hopping or dissatisfaction.

It is very much true that you cannot change the jobs available in economy but the courses of study like engineering should also be oriented according to needs of the industry. And may be with opening up of career opportunities in other areas and with them getting respect things will change in future where a person would not be forced to do things he doesn't want to do in life.