Salaries for IIM-A graduates up by 20 p.c.

76 p.c. accept offers to work in India





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Highest international salary accepted was Rs. 1.44 crore per annum

30 per cent to join consulting sector, 11 to start their own ventures


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AHMEDABAD: Contrary to the apprehensions of a general slowdown in the international economy affecting management institutions, students of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, fetched an average of 20 per cent higher salaries this year compared to last year.

With the campus placements of the two-year Post-Graduate Programme in Management, Post-Graduate Programme in Agri Business Management, and the newly introduced one-year Post-Graduate Programme in Public Management and Policy completed successfully, a happy IIM-A director, Samir Barua, said at least his institution was not impacted by the economic crisis.

‘Most preferred institute’


He also said that the IIM-A continued to be the most preferred institute for recruitment not only in terms of the diversity of the organisations that participated in the recruitment process but also by the offers made by them.

Prof. Barua declined to draw any comparison between the IIM-A and other management institutions in the country on the issue of salary and said that he was not aware what “bonus” components, which mark a bulk of the total salary package offered by international and Indian companies, had been incorporated in the total average salary in the placements conducted in the campuses of other IIMs .

He also said it would be wrong to judge the performance of the students and the standard of the institutions solely on the basis of the highest salary offered instead of going by the average salary offered to the entire batch by the different companies.

The highest international salary accepted in this year’s campus recruitment went up to Rs. 1.44 crore per annum as against Rs. 1.20 crore offered last year. Even the average international salary offered this year was about Rs. 47.60 lakh , against Rs. 36 lakh last year.

Domestic salary


The average domestic salary jumped up by about 30 per cent from Rs. 13.7 lakh last year to about 17.85 lakh this year while the highest domestic salary accepted was about Rs. 70 lakh.

The chairperson of the IIM-A PGP placements committee, Piyush Sinha, said that though the financial sector was supposed to have been hit hard by the economic slowdown and many companies had imposed “hiring freeze,” as many as 113 of the 255 students of the 2006-08 batch would be joining the financial sector.

Recruitment


The major banks to recruit the graduates included Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Merill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Barclays .

While about 30 per cent of the students would be joining the consulting sector, about seven per cent would go to general management and over three per cent to operations.

At least 11 students in the current year’s batch have already opted out of the placements to start their own ventures.

Pointing out that 76 per cent of the students accepted offers to work in India and another 11 per cent in the Asia-Pacific region, as against the total of 77 per cent last year, Prof. Barua said for the first time a French student, Diane Gabriel, doing her dual degree programme from both the ESSEC business school and the IIM-A, had preferred to stay back in India and would be joining a local company after completing her degree.

Similarly in the Agri Business Management Programme, the average salary offered increased from Rs. 10 lakh to Rs. 12.30 lakh .

For a batch of 31 students, 30 companies participated in the placements which for the first time also saw consultancy and other peripheral companies vying with agro-based industries to recruit the IIMA PGP-ABM students.

Of the first 33-students batch of the PGP-PMP, mainly coming from the government and other public sector organisations for a one-year stint in public management and policy, nine students would be returning to the parent organisations who had also sponsored their IIM-A studies. The salary offered to the remaining 24 students, having an average 12 years of work experience, ranged from Rs. 15 lakh to Rs. 40 lakh per annum with an average of Rs. 24 lakh per annum. Prof. Barua said the batch size for the PGP-PMP course for the next year would be expanded to 45 students.