It was expected to be worse at IIM-C
It was expected to be worse at IIM-C
Kolkata/Bangalore: In what perhaps symbolized a disappointing placement season for the class of 2009 at Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), five graduates of IIM Calcutta accepted job offers from Andrew Yule and Co. Ltd, a public sector enterprise that has been in the red for several years.
Average salary offered by local firms at IIM-C fell as much as 23% from last year, reflecting the impact of a slowdown in India’s economy.
IIM-C said in a statement on Tuesday that the average domestic salary was “higher than what was expected". It was Rs16.4 lakh in 2008. As many as 40% of the graduates opted for jobs in the financial sector and about a fifth took up offers made by consulting firms.
“We had expected the situation to be much worse and were wondering whether we could place all our students," said Sekhar Chowdhury, director of IIM-C.
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“Average salaries would have gone down because some high-paying companies like Lehman Brothers are out. The fall would have been similar to the trend seen in similar institutes," Sourav Mukherji, associate professor and chairperson, placements, IIM Bangalore, said on Tuesday, without elaborating. Lehman, the US investment bank, collapsed in mid-September.
IIM-B did not release average salary figures, following a practice it instituted in 2007.
Average salaries for domestic jobs offered to the graduating batch of IIM-Ahmedabad dropped 32% from last year, to Rs12.17 lakh a year, it said last week. Average salary for international jobs at IIM-A dropped 30%, from $119,000 to $83,000.
Jaypee Capital Services Ltd made the maximum number of offers (16) to students of IIM-C, and among foreign recruiters, McKinsey and Co. made 10 offers, followed by Frost and Sullivan at seven.
IIM-C took 10 days to place all 265 students who had applied for jobs. The campus placements took place in two phases starting 21 February; the first leg lasted four days, during which around 200 students were placed.
In the second phase, 60-65 students were hired, many of them by state-owned firms such as Andrew Yule, Coal India Ltd, Union Bank of India, Small Industries Development Bank of India, NTPC Ltd and Indian Oil Corp. Ltd. These firms hired 34 students at an average salary of Rs7 lakh, according to Prafulla Agnihotri, a professor at IIM-C and its chairman for placements and career development. Last year, only one government-constituted organization—Securities and Exchange Board of India—was able to hire from the institute.
At IIM-B, at least a third of the hiring companies were first-time recruiters. Of the 97 companies that offered jobs during the final placements, which concluded on Monday, 39 were new on campus and came from sectors ranging from manufacturing to media and entertainment, health care, clean energy and education. These companies made about 75 offers.
Despite the new entrants, over half the students were hired by traditional favourites, consulting and finance, much as in the previous year. Consulting firms hired 25% of the graduates and financial services 28%.
“It was an unusually optimistic outcome with the economy collapsing like this… When everybody is losing jobs, we are grateful to the companies for hiring our students," Pankaj Chandra, director, IIM-B, told the media on Tuesday.
The two largest recruiters at IIM-B were Boston Consulting Group and Jaypee Capital Services, both of which made 10 job offers.
This was followed by International Business Machines Corp., which hired seven graduates for its consulting and finance functions, and Bosch India, which hired six.
aveek.d@livemint.com
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