Other Finalists : Professional Aptitude Council (PAC) : Bright Sparks

Today most technology companies in the country — MNCs or otherwise — scoop

out their manpower from a handful of so called top colleges and technology

universities. This leads to a certain guarantee for students of these colleges

to have more than one offer letter by the end of the last semester of their

courses provided they perform satisfactorily well. On the other side, the

mushrooming of colleges — government-aided and private — enables students,

especially those located in the Tier II and Tier III cities, to study in

isntitutes closer to their home and take up the same courses as their urban

counterparts. However, there is a problem for most big companies to reach out to

smaller cities and hire students from institutes therein. To solve this problem,

Professional Aptitude Council used technology.

Company Scenario

Before Deployment

IT companies would reach out to a handful of top institutions for head hunting

After Deployment

Students from smaller colleges/cities are benchmarked globally on competencies and companies can offer them the jobs accordingly.

Project Head

Naveen Manjunath, MD, India

The projcet called Bright Sparks is basically an online platform and a free

program for campuses and students. Students register and subscribe to Bright

Sparks where they can view educational content, take practice tests and take

PAC's qualifying exams online to highlight their skills and ability. Each

student who takes up an online test is benchmarked globally on PAC's

international network. And depending on the specific requirements of the

recruitment companies, candidate's performance is graded. Some companies might

have domain-specific cut-off rankings in certain competencies/lan-guages/areas

that can be evaluated by PAC. Blanketing over 2000 institutions all across the

country, PAC aims to place students from Tier II and III cities on the same

global platform as the elite handful.

The Bright Sparks software is deployed on cloud based hosting platform in the

US. It is implemented on a Fractional Cluster using Nginx load balanced server

cluster with a dedicated MySQL database server with master/replica redundancy.

Ruby on Rails web framework, Mongrel application server, MySQL database system,

Nginx HTTP server and load balancer, and 118n International translation

processing have been used.