Young managers going places

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The Faculty of Management Studies at Delhi University recently conducted summer placements for its students. With 70 leading companies participating, a whole lot of choices were available to the students.

The highlight was a 400 per cent increase in the number of international offers made by companies. While many new international companies participated in this year’s process, Indian heavyweights also made a host of international offers to studen ts for a variety of roles overseas.
As many as 20 international offers were made to the students pursuing the two full-time programmes: 91 in MBA, and 42 in MBA-MS (Management of Services).
The financial sector continues to lure students in large numbers and as much as 17 per cent of the batch opted for profiles with leading banks.

“The summer internship programme at FMS provides students with an ideal platform to explore the various verticals and domains. We help them make the right decision by offering them plenty of choices with respect to both companies and profiles. The summer placements at FMS this year have broken all past records. The number of international offers by multi-national companies and Indian ones has increased manifold,” said the convener of placements, Madhu Vij.

The FMS Dean stated that the summer internship was the “nursery for the future business leaders to bloom”.

“The type of assignments that FMS interns are being offered by the cream of the corporate world is quite astounding and reflects great faith in the capabilities of our students,” he added.
Vimal Thorat, a reader in the Hindi Department at Indira Gandhi National Open University in New Delhi, has been appointed coordinator of the Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Chair on Social Change and Development.

The broad objective of the Chair is to work towards dissemination of ideas and thoughts of Dr. Ambedkar in the areas of administration, Constitutional studies, human rights, religion and philosophy.

The Chair will also undertake research and development programmes in these areas and focus on developing appropriate methodologies to pave the way for Dr. Ambedkar’s ideas as policy instrument.

Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, will be conducting a special workshop in December for middle and senior managers of corporate houses and government organisations on “Corporate social responsibility and sustainable business”.

This training will sensitise corporate managers to various issues of CSR and expose them to international developments in sustainable business management.

The workshop, to be held from December 18 to 20, will cover topics like Institutional Environment and Business, Concept of Sustainability: the new broad agenda, Dimensions of Sustainability, Business Ethics and Public private partnership.

The J K group of companies is the latest among corporate houses venturing into academics with the setting up of a Rs.45-crore B-school at Gurgaon.

The institution will initially take up MBA programmes and later expand to other areas like marketing, finance, information technology and international business.

It will also include short-term courses in diverse areas like logistics and supply chain, marketing of financial services, rural marketing, mall management, distribution and sales and brand management.

The wi-fi-enabled campus would also include a state-of-the-art library, computer centre, an auditorium and hostels for boys and girls.

Summer bounty for IIM-A students

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It’s not just the post graduate students (PGPs) who opt for summer placements in consultancy firms.

This year, 21 per cent of students at the Post Graduate Programme in Agri Business Management (PGP-ABM) at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) opted for consulting companies for the summers. The batch has preferred working with agri and food retail sectors in the past.

This year, consultancy major PricewaterhouseCoopers and knowledge banking and agri-consulting firm YES Bank came to IIM-A to offer consulting positions. A total of 17 companies participated in the summer placement process of ABM programme for a batch of 25 students.

Other new entrants this season were global agribusiness giant Louis Dreyfus, Miebach Logistics, Glaxo Smith Kline, Aditya Birla Group for their retail venture, Britannia, Nandan Biomatrix and Claris Lifesciences.

Regular recruiters like RPG, Godrej, Marico, ITC, ICICI Bank and ICICI Prudential continued their association this year as well with the ABM students who undergo common academic module with the PGP programme for the first year of study.

Around 27 per cent of the students preferred retail companies, 21 per cent of the students opted for consulting, 21 per cent for supply chain, 13 per cent for finance while 4 per cent opted for market research.

“With RPG’s growth story and the retail expansion, we find very valuable talent for the future leadership positions from the students of IIM Ahmedabad Agri-Business Management,” said Arvind N Agrawal, president, Corporate Development and HR , RPG Group.

Lately, IIM-A agri-business managers have interested companies in the food retail sector. Projects offered to the students included positions in supply-chain management, retailing, agri and food consulting, finance, market research and strategy formulation. The students had, on an average, about 2 offers to choose from.

Piyush Kumar Sinha, chairperson, Placement Committee of IIM-A, said that a larger number of companies expressed their keenness to offer summer projects, and there was a hike in average stipend; but what delighted students was an opportunity to work on high profile live projects.

CATch the confusion

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Every year, Common Admission Test (CAT), for the IIMs and various other B-schools, manages to keep everyone wondering about the format of its question paper. Be it the total number of questions, marks allotted per question or varying difficulty levels of different sections, CAT has enough permutations to baffle aspirants. But it is not only the aspirants, even the four popular coaching institutes (IMS, PT, CL and TIME) are as puzzled. In a reality check done on November 19 to see what the answer keys of different coaching institutes had in store, presented huge variations in the answer keys.

These four institutes train more than half of the total number of CAT aspirants every year and therefore answer keys of these institutes were referred. This year’s CAT had 75 questions and when answer keys were compared it was found that answers for 19 questions differed. This accounts for more than 25% of the total number of questions. So a candidate calculating his or her CAT score will either have four sets of score cards, per coaching institute basis, or will simply not be able to get a final score. Of course there will be one answer key that will have minimum errors, or may be none, amongst the four in it but even then the other three will certainly have errors.

This is an area of concern and a pressing need to address this. Further analysis revealed that the language section had 14 such questions while Data Interpretation had four and Quant section had one such question (refer to the table). Pre-empting the pattern of the CAT paper has been the dream of every coaching institute and this is understandable considering the nature of the exam that emphasises on ‘on your toes’ thinking. But when it comes to solving a CAT paper and providing students with the right answer, isn’t it time that top brains of all these coaching institutes sit together to arrive at a consolidated answer key, after a thorough discussion and analysis. This will help lakhs of students strategising for their other examinations and will also put an end to this wide-spread confusion.

Unfolding of an educational revolution

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Slowly but certainly a quiet revolution is taking place. India has experienced, encountered and lived with several revolutions. Beginning with industrial revolution about a hundred years ago, which today is thriving, to the green revolution, to the white revolution, to IT revolution to India standing at the threshold of educational revolution. Education for achievement and performance, to education as a means for job and occupation to now education as a learning process for a holistic development and growth of an individual.

In small ways beginning with and few learning institutions the focus is on perspectives in addition to skill building, philosophical understanding in addition to analytical abilities, a process of learning in addition to memorizing and exams and most important to engage and relate to the whole person. Here the student learns to integrate thoughts (knowledge) behavior (including emotions and feelings) and actions. (Educational institution of such a nature focuses on the processes of growth, makes the learning interactive and participative, involves the various constituencies viz students, teachers, administration, staff and the external environment in a coherence, convergent and vibrant setting. This means there is time space and people who discover values to live by, who engage with each other, groups and systems with respect and dignity, who learn to make tough choices and not compromises and who work with self discipline as well as rigor of learning which creates excellence in innovators and entrepreneurs. Such a process has begun in India.

Such learning institutions are taking small steps towards creating new knowledge relevant for times, evolving new frameworks and theories, understanding the global context and insights into the strengths of the socio – cultural collective psyche which can be mobilized for a learning process where the individual student and the teacher discover the magic of the learning experience and translate into wisdom.

CAT Cutoffs: What various institutes predict

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Soon after CAT was out of the bag, India’s top-tier management entrance institutes like IMS Learnings, Career Launcher, TIME and Career Forum got busy in making predictions on what cutoffs are likely to get you a call from the IIMs.

Overall Cutoff
IMS Learning Center : 100+
Career Launcher : 102-107
TIME : 88-92
Career Forum : 123+
MBA Guru : 96
Professional Tutorials : 105-115

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