EduCrush Team
20 June 2026
Your parents say focus on marks. LinkedIn says skills matter more. Both are partially right and partially outdated. Here's what actually decides whether you get hired in 2026.
Every engineering student has heard both sides of this argument a hundred times. Parents and professors say focus on your CGPA — it's the first thing companies see. Seniors and LinkedIn influencers say CGPA is irrelevant — nobody asks about it once you can code. The truth, as usual, sits somewhere in between, and it depends heavily on which door you are trying to walk through.
This is not a motivational post telling you marks don't matter. It is also not a guilt-trip telling you to study harder. It is a breakdown of exactly where CGPA still matters, where it stops mattering, and what you should actually be optimizing for depending on your situation.
The biggest myth in the "skills over CGPA" narrative is that it applies everywhere equally. It doesn't. CGPA still acts as a hard filter in several very common hiring situations:
🏢 Campus Placements at Service Companies
TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, and most large IT service companies use CGPA as an eligibility cutoff before you even sit for their test. A typical cutoff is 60% or above, sometimes 65%. If you fall below that line, you often don't get the option to even attempt the test — regardless of how good your GitHub profile looks. This is not a skills evaluation. It's an administrative filter to manage application volume, and it eliminates candidates before their actual ability is ever assessed.
🎓 Higher Studies and Government Exams
If your plan involves an MTech, an MS abroad, GATE, or any PSU recruitment through GATE scores, your CGPA is directly part of the evaluation — sometimes converted into a percentage that affects your eligibility or your final ranking. There is no "skills bypass" for this path. A strong CGPA here is not optional; it's foundational.
📋 PSU and Government Job Applications
Public sector companies like ONGC, BHEL, NTPC, and various PSUs that recruit through GATE or their own exams almost always have a minimum CGPA or percentage eligibility criterion. No amount of personal projects changes this requirement.
Once you get past the initial eligibility filter — or if you're applying somewhere that doesn't use CGPA as a filter at all — the conversation changes entirely.
💻 Product Companies and Startups
Companies like Razorpay, Zerodha, CRED, Freshworks, and most funded startups rarely ask about your CGPA during the interview process. What they care about is whether you can solve the problem in front of you, whether your code is clean, and whether you understand the trade-offs in your design decisions. A 6.5 CGPA candidate who has built two solid projects and can explain their architecture will outperform an 8.5 CGPA candidate who can recite theory but struggles to write working code on a whiteboard.
🌐 Off-Campus Applications and Referrals
When you apply directly through a company's careers page or get referred by someone, your resume is screened by a recruiter or an engineering manager who is looking for relevant projects, technologies, and problem-solving signals — not a CGPA cutoff. This is the channel where skill-heavy, marks-light candidates consistently win.
🛠️ Technical Interviews Themselves
Regardless of which company you're interviewing with, once you're in the actual technical round, nobody is looking at your transcript anymore. You are being evaluated in real time on how you think, how you code, and how you communicate your reasoning. CGPA got you into the room in some cases — it does not get you the offer.
The smartest approach is not to pick a side in this debate — it's to understand that CGPA and skills serve two completely different functions in your career, and ignoring either one creates a specific, predictable problem.
If you ignore CGPA entirely and let it slide to 5.5 or 6, you lose access to the entire campus placement channel at most service companies, you become ineligible for most PSU and government opportunities, and you close the door on higher studies — even if your skills are genuinely strong. This is the mistake students make when they hear "CGPA doesn't matter" and take it too literally.
If you ignore skills entirely and chase a 9+ CGPA with no projects, no DSA practice, and no real coding experience, you will clear the initial eligibility filters at service companies — and then fail the actual technical round, because there is nothing behind the number. This is the mistake students make when they assume marks alone are the finish line.
The students who do best in 2026 treat CGPA as a minimum bar to clear — usually somewhere around 7.0 to 7.5 is a safe target that keeps every door open — and then spend their actual energy building skills, projects, and a portfolio that does the real work of getting them hired.
Here's a practical way to think about how to split your time and energy across your engineering years:
- Maintain a CGPA above 7.0 — This keeps you eligible for campus placements, PSU recruitment, and higher studies. It does not need to be your top priority, but it cannot be neglected either. A few extra hours before exams, understanding rather than memorizing, and not skipping internal assessments will get you here without consuming your entire semester.
- Spend the remaining 70% of your effort on skills — DSA practice, real projects, internships, and a GitHub profile that shows consistent work. This is what actually gets you through technical interviews and what differentiates you in a pool of candidates with similar CGPAs.
This is not about doing the bare minimum academically. It's about recognizing that beyond a certain threshold, additional CGPA points have diminishing returns for your career outcomes, while skills have almost no ceiling on how much they can help you.
Based on how hiring actually works across service companies, product companies, and startups in India today, here is the realistic order of what gets evaluated:
- Step 1 — Eligibility filter: CGPA cutoff (for campus drives), branch relevance, backlog status. This determines whether you even get considered.
- Step 2 — Resume screening: Projects, internships, certifications, GitHub activity. This determines whether you get called for an interview.
- Step 3 — Technical round: Actual problem-solving, coding ability, system understanding. This determines whether you get the offer.
- Step 4 — HR round: Communication, culture fit, salary expectations. This determines the final offer terms.
CGPA only plays a meaningful role in Step 1 — and only for certain hiring channels. Steps 2, 3, and 4 are almost entirely skill and communication driven. If you only optimize for Step 1, you may never reach Steps 2 through 4 with a strong enough profile to convert.
CGPA is not irrelevant, and skills are not a magic bypass for a weak academic record. They serve different gates in your career path, and the students who struggle the most are usually the ones who bet everything on just one of them — either burning out trying to maintain a 9+ CGPA with nothing else to show, or letting their marks fall so low that they lose access to entire categories of opportunities before their skills even get evaluated.
Keep your CGPA above the danger zone. Then spend your real energy on the things that actually get you through an interview — because once you're past the eligibility filter, nobody is asking to see your mark sheet again.
— EduCrush Team 🎓
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EduCrush Team
Part of the EduCrush team — building free resources for every Indian student.
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