XIM, Bhubaneswar placements scale new heights

Following the downswing in the world economic environment in 2008, the academic year 2009-10 brought with it a fresh lease of vibrancy which Xuberance 2010, the Annual Campus Recruitment Process of Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIMB), captured to its utmost extent. Xuberance 2010 was successful in drafting yet another glorious chapter in the placement record book of XIMB with 100% placements for the Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) course reinforcing the strong academic culture of the institute. Xuberance 2010 witnessed the participation of regular recruiters aptly complemented by a plethora of new entrants.

The Rural Management Programme of XIMB was started with the objective of catering to the increasing demand for trained professionals in organizations working in the rural space. With the urban markets becoming increasingly saturated, ‘Go Rural’ has become the buzz word today. The 10 year old Rural Management Programme at XIMB has churned out many professionals who now hold important positions in the corporate space as well as influence the policy making mechanism of the country.

In keeping with tradition, the RM programme also witnessed 100% placements this year with all 53 students joining their fields of core competence. The placement week saw the participation of over 20 companies. Recruiters were broadly classified under four sectors- Banking & Microfinance, Agriculture & Allied Business, Research & Consultancy and Development. 

 

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Pre-placement offers at IIMs

The new year is bringing along with it a lot of hope for the IIM students. With pre-placement offers (PPOs) pouring in, students are singing away the recessionary blues. Most of the IIMs are hoping to exceed the 2008-2009 numbers, which saw students bagging about 250 PPOs as compared to over 500 offers made the year before.

“The placement process for the batch of 2010 is on in full swing at IIM-C and as of last week, more than 100 offers (both PPOs and laterals combined) have been received by students from various firms,” said Hariharan Sriram,external relations secretary of IIM-C. Last year the institute bagged about 56 PPOs as against 90 in 2008.

“We've also witnessed an increase in the packages offered to the students, with a few offers above 20 lakh per annum being made. This is a significant improvement compared to last year. But the mood on campus is one of guarded optimism, as the numbers are still not as good as the pre-recession 2007-08 levels,” Sriram said.

The recruiters who have made offers this year include Cognizant Business Consulting, Delloite, Hinduja Group, Aditya Birla Group, Accenture Business Consulting, Mahindra & Mahindra, Virtusa, Essar and Bristlecone.

The scene is not much different at IIM-L. “The PPOs have started coming in from July last year. Together with the laterals, PPOs this year has crossed 100 offers and more are expected to come in until the final placement process begins,” Sharat Chander, member of IIM-L placement cell, said. The total number of firms participating in the placements this year has seen a 100 per cent increase at IIM-L.

Although IIM-Ahmedabad did not disclose details about salary, it said the number of PPOs range between 40 and 50 this year. According to Himanshu Nema, student placement co-ordinator of IIM-A, companies such as Cognizant and Aditya Birla Group have offered jobs. “We expect a larger number of firms to participate in the finals this year,” he added.

At IIM-K, too, the number of PPOs offered this year has seen a significant rise. “PPOs and pre-placement interviews (PPIs) combined, this year we have received about 35 offers as against 20-25 offers received last year,” said Rohan Jaikishen of the student placement committee at IIM-K.

IIM-B, refused to divulge any details about placements. Last year IIM-B got about 40 offers as against 105-110 offers in 2007-08. Lateral placements at the institute began in the third week of December last year and will continue till February 15. Final placements will begin in the first week of March.

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Does an Entrepreneur Need an MBA?

A lot of (wannabe) entrepreneurs ask or indeed wonder if they should enroll in a business school and get “business expertise” that would be useful to them as entrepreneurs.

Acknowledging this, an increasing number of universities and colleges are offering courses in entrepreneurship as part of their business education. Around the world, business plan competitions are held by academic institutions at regular intervals. The wide publicity given to entrepreneurship in recent times has resulted in entrepreneurs gaining respect and being acknowledged as critical participants in a country’s economy, wealth and job creation.

But does taking a course or two in entrepreneurship while pursuing a business degree make one a better entrepreneur? I don’t think so. While they’re useful in understanding multiple aspects of entrepreneurship, these courses don’t make you a better entrepreneur. Are these courses useless then? Not really.

A small percentage of any population becomes entrepreneurs while the vast majority becomes employees. There’s nothing good or bad or right or wrong about this – it is just the way it is and indeed should be as both entrepreneurs and managers-employees perform complementary activities in the growth of an economy.

A significant number of professional investors are MBAs while an overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs are not! MBAs are trained to assess and attempt to mitigate risk and determine value of an investment in the future, a tricky thing to do in the best of times.

Additionally, there’s the seeming opportunity cost for an MBA – fancy salaries and lifestyles that effectively preclude any entrepreneurial thoughts. On the other hand, an entrepreneur needs to take several leaps of faith at various points (which unfortunately cannot be modeled), needs to be a good judge of people and situations (experience is a great teacher here) and be able to persevere, motivate and excite his team and partners to deliver (no MBA program teaches this). Taking decisions with incomplete information and with imperfect people isn’t what the classroom teaches. Only experience, introspection and a mentor teach you these lessons. Analytical skills alone won’t suffice, there needs to be synthesis as well - an ability to see the forest, the lay of the land and accordingly marshal resources to make a road.

In countries like India, most students doing their MBA have little or no work experience. Their ability therefore to spot opportunities, appreciate scenarios, develop and leverage relationships is limited compared to those with experience. It also doesn’t help that academic institutions in India are insulated from industry, entrepreneurs and the entrepreneur ecosystem.

Yet why are investors almost always biased in favor of entrepreneurs with degrees from well known business schools? The reason is that, all other things being equal, the degree is a filter – demonstrates that the holder has passed other stringent selection criteria. It is obviously not perfect. On the other hand, many professional investors and many senior executives in the corporate sector are usually business school an alumnus so having the MBA degree assures a network that can be leveraged by the entrepreneur.

Now here’s an exercise worth doing. Business school education in the US is about 100 years old and about 45 years old in India. During this time, how many wealth creators (not companies lifestyle or income-substitution businesses like consultancies), across all sectors of the economy, were founded by MBA entrepreneurs in either country? What about economies like Israel, Taiwan, China, Korea, Germany, UK, and Japan? My guess is that this number would be a very tiny fraction. What’s yours?

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IRMA placements a big hit, salaries up 20%

AHMEDABAD: Dollar salaries don’t ring too many bells here. An overseas posting could mean the challenge of starting a one-teacher school in a remote Bhutanese village; and Day Zero is the day when you manage to recoup the first Rs 100 you shelled out by way of a micro finance loan to a poor farmer in Warangal.

Yet this is a campus placement, and this too is a B-school. The placement season here coincides with a larger-than-life version of what’s currently taking place in the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, barely 100 km away.

Welcome to the world of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), a B-school that’s high in demand as state administrations, micro-finance institutions and educational institutions realise that the developmental process in India doesn’t lack money, it’s just awfully short of capable hands that can manage it.

A week ago, on the very first day of its campus placement season IRMA managed to place all its students of the 2010 batch. Sure, no bulge-bracket figures here, the average salary stood at Rs 6 lakh per annum, 20% higher than last year’s.

But each of the 65 students received more than two job offers. And among the top recruiters were the tribal welfare divisions of the state governments and organisations involved in livelihood projects with names like Hole-In-The-Wall and Basix.

IRMA managed this despite the absence of banks, both public and private sector, that usually recruit around 50% of the students every year. Placement coordinator professor Saswata Narayan Biswas says over 45 organisations approached IRMA this year, of which 19 were invited to the campus.

So what explains this rush at a campus devoted to management at the grassroot level?

Magsaysay winner and IRMA board member Deep Joshi says that the institute scores because the Indian education system fails to encourage students to work in rural areas. “Funding is no more a problem in the past 10 years or so with the Centre promoting schemes like NREG. However, the development sector lacks talented and knowledgeable people who can work in rural India and guide people to utilise their funds in an appropriate manner,” he says.

At Placements 2010, Hyderabad-based livelihood organisation Basix picked up the highest number — 12 students. “Former IRMA candidates have not only grown with Basix but have also started their own initiatives. We will deploy the students in all the functional areas as management trainees for a couple of years. They will work in consulting, agriculture, energy, climate change, IT and HR,” says Rama Kadamb, who heads leadership development at Basix, which operates in 12 states.

Hole-in-the-Wall, an organisation working on education through learning stations, recruited two students to be placed in Bhutan for project work.

The Andhra Pradesh government wants to engage the IRMA students it picked up in its tribal welfare department while the Gujarat government has recruited for its Development Support Agency and Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority. Madhya Pradesh roped in an IRMA student for a World Bank project.

Out of 65, over 25 students were placed with the state governments while organisations engaged in microfinance and livelihood projects recruited 30, says Mr Biswas. Among others, headhunters from traditional placement participants Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (Amul) and National Dairy Development Board recruited nine students while ITC picked up three for its e-Chaupal.

IRMA, set up in 1979 by India’s milkman Verghese Kurien, has enlisted over 650 organisations, which can participate in the placement process. “Placements for 2010 has once again proved the faith of organisations engaged with microfinance and livelihood activities in IRMA by recruiting students in a big way,” says IRMA director Vivek Bhandari. 

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First computer based NMAT successful

Almost 40,000 students took the first computer based Narsee Monjee Management Aptitude Test (NMAT) to gain admission in the Mumbai-based Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS). For the first time, NMAT was conducted in a computer based format by computer-based testing company Pearson VUE for a period of 10 days.

From 30 January to 8 February, the test was synchronously conducted across 51 centres in 19 cities in India and 11 countries outside India. Other countries where the test was taken were Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, among others. There were 1,530 batches with three slots each day and students were to come 45 minutes before the exam began.

Though no batch had to be cancelled because of any technical reasons, there were technical glitches due to which there were interruptions (the Common Admission Test or CAT conducted by the premier Indian Institutes of Management or IIMs, on the other hand, had to cancel tests at centres across the country due to technical glitches). At a test centre in Mumbai, for instance, power to the network was switched off and there was a delay of 20 minutes in the test. At another test center in Noida, a network card developed a fault. In another test centre in Delhi, the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) developed a fault due to which there was no power for around 20 minutes.

“Of all the batches, four batches experienced a temporary interruption but the test was resumed. It was for this reason that we kept 9 February as an extra day if any contingencies occurred and any batch had to be rescheduled,” said Pearson VUE’s Managing Director for Asia Pacific, Sarvesh Shrivastava.

The test results, that will be out in March, will be used for admission to NMIMS’ management programmes comprising MBA Core (300 seats); MBA Actuarial Sciences (30 seats); Capital markets (30 seats); Banking (30 seats); Pharma Management (60 seats); MBA Part Time (240 seats) and Executive Doctoral Programme (25 seats).

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IIM-A's cohort-based placement process

Return of the investment banks such as Bank of America-Merrill Lynch to campus marked the start of the placements for the final year students of Post Graduate Programme in Management at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

Regular recruiters Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Co gave out eight offers each, including pre-placement offers, according to a release. In contrast to the previous years when the placement used to happen over seven to 10 days, this year, the institute decided to have a cohort based system which will go on for two months.

Instead of back-to-back interview sessions, the companies will be segregated into sectors and meet students over weekends. Recruiters will spend more time with each student thereby arriving at a ‘right-fit' between students and companies, according to Prof Sara Mukherjee, Placement Coordinator. The first cluster had companies across four cohorts — international investment banks, global strategy consulting, global niche consulting and private equity/venture capital.

As the initial apprehensions to the new system eased, the implementers were satisfied that the new system was progressing well.

“As the day progressed, the relaxed atmosphere in and around the interview rooms was a pointer that we have moved in the right direction. The recruiters have expressed satisfaction with the new process and students too have interviewed with the firms of their choice,” said Prof Mukherjee.

There is also a tighter control over dissemination of information from the campus and strict instructions have been given to students about not communicating with the media in order to avoid speculations.

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