Education, Careers & Professional News
A Comeback for Management Graduates
Its the return of managers. After a lull that B-schools witnessed during the software industrys unprecedented high, the 2005-06 batch has marked a comeback for management graduates.
While the pre-placement offer (PPO) season commences post-November, prominent management institutes are on the crest of a wave; what with corporates storming in to grab the best brains of the batch graduating in 2006!
Chew this: While the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, had 45 PPOs in 2005, there are over 25 PPOs already made for the 2006 batch, of which over a dozen are overseas postings.
While we saw just six overseas postings in 2004, the number went up to 10 in 2005 and even before our PPO season, IIM-B has received over a dozen overseas postings. We are expecting more to come in as the PPO season will be on till February 2006,a placement officer at the IIM-B campus told The Times Of India.
Older IIMs in Ahmedabad and Kolkata are not behind. IIM-Calcutta has bagged 24 PPOs, of them a huge proportion being overseas postings. Younger IIMs too have had to open their gates to recruiters early this year. IIM-Indore has received 10 PPOs to date and the figure at the Lucknow campus is a little over half a dozen.
Driving home the fact that workplaces are looking high and low for management graduates, the offers have brought back the fat pay packets that management students once boasted of. This year, Gaurav Agarwal, an MBA student at IIM Bangalore, was recently offered a placement by a London-based Investment Bank with a pay package of 105,000 pounds per annum.
And at the Kolkata campus, a student interning with a UK-based banking major has received an associate offer of 100,000 pounds.
If those are the packages designed by overseas companies, a foreign investment bank has offered another IIM-B second-year student, Venkatesh Sankararaman, Rs 30 lakh per annum at its Mumbai office.
This is one of the highest domestic offers made to an IIM-B graduate. We expect a steady increase in the overseas postings and the stipend too. There was a slump because of the boom in the IT industry, but managers are in demand again, said the IIM-B placement officer.
According to IIM-Kolkata placement officer Saurabh Srivastava, Another very important trend was that this was the first year that students from Indian B schools have offers similar to those offered to students with work experience.