The demand for top talent to manage change in a tech- and data-led world remains strong. Our top B-schools lend India Inc a helping hand to grow in a fast-changing world
INDIAN BUSINESS SCHOOL campuses are abuzz. It is that time of the year when, in many campuses, companies recruit summer interns, a route that more and more of them are taking to find potential employees instead of relying solely on the half-hour interviews during final placements. This year, as India Inc. gets ready to expand after years of surviving in a slow growing economy and embraces technology and data to manage change, the buzz on B-school campuses is louder. Salaries, going by the final placement figures, are up – for instance, for the top 25 B-schools, the mean average domestic salary in 2018 was ` 16.98 lakh compared to
` 15.78 lakh in 2017. For the next 25, the figure for this year is ` 9.24 lakh compared to ` 8.46 lakh in 2017. Consultants are among the top favourites again – they hired one-third of the batch at IIM-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) – as more and more companies engage them to manage change and grow in the marketplace increasingly getting impacted by technology. So are banks, again looking to adopt latest technology and use big data to put years of slow growth behind them. Ecommerce, the most sought-after sector during the peak of the funding boom till a few years ago, seems to be getting back after a lull; it accounted for 10 per cent placements at IIM-A. And the IT sector, say placement heads, is all but missing, a reflection of muted demand despite all the focus around digital transformation for their clients.
Change on Campus
While hiring trends reflect broader economic shifts, the country's B-schools are themselves going through a major churn. The overall rankings of the top B-schools, more or less unchanged from last year, do not do full justice to the effort each institute is putting in different areas to offer a higher value proposition to students, recruiters and faculty. For instance, though IIM-A has been ranked the country’s top B-school, in terms of offering global exposure, IIM-Calcutta is way ahead, followed by XLRI, IIMBangalore, SPJIMR and MDI. In student and faculty foreign exchange
“BUSINESSES ARE RECREATING THEMSELVES AND LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE CONTENT KNOWLEDGE FROM THE FIELD AND CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE FROM BOOKS” Errol D’souza Director, IIM-A
programmes, too, SPJIMR and a few others among the top 25 have done better than IIM-A, though in terms of salaries offered during campus placements, most of the leading schools have scored well. As for the learning experience, all top three IIMs (IIM-A, IIM-C and IIM-B) stand out, followed by SPJIMR. That apart, institutes like IIM Indore and Indian Institute of Foreign Trade have built on their previous year’s strengths in this space (see The Top 10).
The race to be the best is truly on. So are efforts to provide talent/skills that the corporate world needs to survive
the cut-throat marketplace. “Businesses are continuously recreating themselves and looking for people who have content knowledge from the field and conceptual knowledge from text books and study material. We try each year to build on the content knowledge by ensuring faculty that brings those components into classrooms from their research and consulting experiences,” says Errol D’Souza, Director, IIM-A. The school, unlike most others that follow a day system for placements, has a cluster cohort system where companies are divided on the basis of the sector. Giving a sense of numbers and trends, Amit Karna, Chairperson, Placements, IIM-A, says, “Overall, the numbers have been quite positive. In 2018,
124 students, about a third (32 per cent) of the batch, went into consulting in final placements as against 103, or about
27 per cent, in 2017, followed by banking, which hired 15 per cent of the batch. Then there were consumer goods players. One highlight was ecommerce, which hired 10 per cent of the batch. The IT sector, however, hired less.”
These numbers also tell us how the next year is going to be as companies anticipate early so that they can invest in human capital, he says. The conclusion is that the hiring tempo will continue, and so will the difficulties with companies attempting transition. Consultants are likely to make a lot of money
(See “Domain Dons”).
The story is not very different in other campuses. For instance, the IIM-B class of 420 that passed out in February this year got 462 offers from over 140 companies. Many recruiters made more offers than initially indicated. Prashant Mishra, Dean, New Initiatives and External Relations at IIM-C, says there has been a general year on year rise in number of companies visiting the campus and