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Education Plus
Spectacular show by IIM-K
J.S. BABLU
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The international, domestic and average salaries all went up as this year’s placements concluded.
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Twenty-three international offers were made on the IIM-K campus, with plum roles based out of the U.S., Europe, West Asia, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Campus placements are an important part of the calendar of any business school. Lateral and final placements are occasions for the schools to showcase the talent of their students.The placement scenario at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) this year reveals that the rise in salary graph continues. International, domestic and average salaries all went up. More students grabbed opportunities in consulting, as the number of offers from this sector increased this year. However, banking and financial services and investment banks continue to take away a major chunk of the students. The number of students opting for jobs within the country is increasing over the years.
The elite business schools, such as the IIMs, at the national level continue to attract leading companies for permanent placement of their graduates primarily because of the credibility and goodwill they have built up over decades, says K.S.B. Nayar, alumnus of IIM, Ahmedabad, and currently Director, Farook Institute of Management Studies, Kozhikode, and Honorary Professor, Dr. Albert Schweitzer International University, Geneva.
“Companies target established institutions of management education in view of the availability of ‘ready-to-use’ graduates who undergo rigorous, state-of-the-art academic activities during their management programmes.”
Asif Abbas, who did his engineering in electronics and communication from the College of Engineering, Guindy, and then joined the IIM, Kozhikode, is one of those who took up consulting during the current placements. He has joined Accenture Business Consulting as an analyst with a salary package of Rs. 16.5 lakh a year.
“In consulting, you are basically divided into teams and will be assigned to a project helping out a client with some business problem of theirs. During my course at the IIM-K, in one of our projects, my group had worked with a local business group with their marketing problem and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Seeing your ideas implemented by the clients and finally helping them solve their problems excited me,” he says.
“That was when I knew that consulting is the right career choice for me. Plus consulting is one area where you use your learning from all domains, be it marketing, finance or operations, in your work.”
The performance of the IIM-K in placements this year was spectacular. It bagged the highest international offer in lateral placements (lateral placements are for students with prior industry experience) among the IIMs. This was also the highest international offer ever to be made at the institute. The salary offered to the student, who had two-year work experience, by an oil and gas conglomerate was $175,000 (roughly Rs. 70 lakh). This was a jump of 60 per cent over last year’s highest international offer.
When results of the final placements at the other IIMs were declared, this was not the highest though.
Twenty-three international offers were made on the IIM-K campus, with plum roles based out of the U.S., Europe, West Asia, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
“IIM-K had been doing fabulously every year in placements. Only this year it got wide publicity in the media and that was why everybody was talking about it. The institute was not participating in any b-school rankings brought out by publications for the last three years. This year, when it decided to participate in one survey, it was ranked fourth by [a prominent] magazine,” a member of the placement committee says.
“Likewise, this year, the recruitments were spectacular thanks to the conscious efforts of the placement committee to look for international recruiters and to establish relations with domestic recruiters. Accenture Business Consulting had employed eight people from the IIM-K, but the number was not more than five in other IIMs. The company had employed some of the seniors whose excellent performance prompted them to come again to the campus for recruitment.”
Mr. Abbas says that four things that the IIM-K students generally look for while joining a company are role, pay, band of company and location. “In these, the role plays a very important factor in their decision-making as can be seen by the fact that many students left higher paying jobs for a better role. This could be due to two reasons.
One being that they enjoy working in that particular role. After all, if you don’t like the work that you are doing your performance levels might come down,” he says.
“The second reason could be that the learning opportunities as well as long-term career growth opportunities might be higher in a particular role and so, people are willing to take a salary hit.”
Records shattered
The highlight of placements this year at the IIM-K was an average salary of Rs. 14.83 lakh a year, a rise of 16 per cent over last year’s figure. The highest domestic salary shot up by 28 per cent to Rs. 29 lakh a year. A total of 105 recruiters from around the globe participated. A total of 178 students got no fewer than 402 jobs, shattering all records.
Close to 20 per cent of the batch elected to accept slightly lesser paying roles out of the multiple offers, choosing role over pay.
Ninety per cent of the batch signed out with offers well in excess of Rs. 10 lakh and above. Twenty-five chose consulting, 36 per cent, banking and financial services; 22 per cent, marketing; and 9 per cent, information technology (IT) and IT-enabled-services. Operations, human resources and general management accounted for 8 per cent. The sunrise retail sector also offered jobs, with Bharti, Essar, Raymonds, Reliance and RPG recruiting a large number of students.
Another significant feature of this year’s placements, says a member of placement committee, was that Aricent, a telecom company, offered a project manager post for Rs. 17 lakh a year.
Another post of global engagement manager, a most sought after job in IT, was offered by Infosys at a salary of $1,30,000 a year (roughly Rs. 52 lakh).
Shravan Menta has had three offers, one each from PricewaterhouseCoopers, HSBC and Barclay. It was a level-2 consulting offer from PricewaterhouseCoopers with a package of Rs. 13 lakh a year. HSBC and Barclay offered Rs. 17 lakh each. HSBC offered him a position of associate vice-president, while Barclay offered him a P 4 position.
Mr. Menta, an electrical engineer from BITS, Pilani, and with two years in the IT industry, had his summer internship in HSBC and as such, the HSBC offer was a pre-placement offer. Barclay’s was a lateral placement offer.
It was Mr. Menta’s interest in banking that attracted him to this sector. He says that he has dropped the consulting offer and is thinking of choosing one of the two offers in the banking sector.
Some IIM-K students rejected international offers. Vamsi Chunduru rejected the offer given to him as procurement centre manager by a company in trading commodities abroad.
The offer was $85000 (Rs. 34 lakh) a year. But he settled for a domestic offer to work in a branch of an MNC bank. That is, he settled for a job with an annual pay packet of Rs 15 lakh instead.
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