IIM-A placement: Few takers for entrepreneur as career, drop in 'dream' jobs

Only two students of the Post Graduate Programme (PGP) in Management at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, (IIM-A) chose entrepreneurship as a career option. This is in sharp contrast from the six students who ventured into entrepreneurship last year.

The two students will work under the mentorship of Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CII), IIM-A.

“The number of students opting for entrepreneurship depends on their individual interests. There is no specific reason we can assign to the decline in this number this year,” said a representative of the IIM-A placement committee.

From a batch of 393 students, 385 sat for placements and the remaining six sought off-campus recruitment.

The number of “dream” applications also witnessed a decline this year. Last year, there were 176 “dream” applications. However, this year only 143 dream applications were received.

A “dream” application gives students the flexibility to build careers in sectors of their preference, making “dream” applications to firms of their choice in a subsequent cluster even with an offer in hand.

“The placement committee aims to ensure that all students get a career in their preferred sectors by giving them dream applications and options to hold their pre-placement and lateral offers, and make a limited number of applications. This placement season, we saw a lot more students exercising their options to pursue their target sectors through dream applications,” Kautuk Kushansh, the recruitment secretary at IIM-A, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the institute recorded an increase in the number of recruiters. As many as 139 firms participated with 184 different roles in the placement process as against the 125 firms that offered 150 roles in 2018. There were 33 first time recruiters.

“This year we got an opportunity to welcome 33 new recruiters, including a new cohort of media and advertising firms,” Prof Amit Karna, chairperson of the IIMA Placement Committee said.

Some of the first time recruiters are SAIF Partners, Russell Reynolds, Etihad Airways, OLAM, United Breweries.

“This was our first experience recruiting at IIM Ahmedabad as a firm and we were very pleased with the overall experience. We found the quality of candidates to be very good and the process was very well organised,” said Ritu Khandelia, executive director, Russell Reynolds Associates.

As per the sectoral overview, Private Equity and Venture Capital (PE/VC) cohort witnessed a 200 per cent increase in participation.

“Last year, there were only two participating firms from the PE/VC cohort. This year, it has increased to six and included recruiters like Matrix Partners and SAIF Partners,” said a representative of the placement committee.

The placement process was conducted in two stages. The first was the ‘Laterals’ process where firms interviewed students with prior work experience and offered them mid-level managerial positions. For this, 36 firms hired from diverse sectors such as technology, banking, consulting, general management and analytics.

Firms like Accenture Strategy, AT Kearney, Barclays, Citi bank, Goldman Sachs, HUL, Nestle, P&G, Aditya Birla Group, CK Birla, RPG Group, Etihad Airways, Microsoft, Ola, Oyo Rooms etc participated in the process.

News Source (Indian Express)