MBA Placements beat recessionary blues.....
Several economies were sent into recession when a global financial crisis struck few years back, making it hard for MBA graduates, even from premium institutes to get job offers. But a change can be seen this year, according to a recent global management education survey, 50% of the MBA students received job offers before they were even graduated, this is quite a fair amount.
The survey involved 4, 794 soon-to-be graduates from 156 management institutions worldwide and was conducted by the Graduate Management Admission Council, which runs GMAT, a globally accepted entrance test. It found that 54% of B-school students had job offers before graduation, a significant rise over 2010 when only 32% of the final-year batch of B-school students had job offers in hand before they graduated.
The optimism this year needs to be tempered with the fact that the figures haven’t yet touched the dizzying heights they reached in the year 2000, when 70% of all B-school graduates had job offers before graduation. But compared with a slump in 2003, the upswing seems to be a lot quicker this time round.
“I firmly believe that the current recovery is based on stronger fundamentals, as corporate are now more pragmatic after having learnt from the last few years,” says Madhukar Kamat, CEO and managing director of the Mudra Group. Kishore Biyani, CEO of the Future Group, feels a sharper fall in 2008 brought about a quicker recovery. “When you fall down really hard, you bounce back to greater heights,” said Biyani. According to V K Menon, senior director, careers and admissions at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, MBA hiring patterns lag behind business cycles, both during an upturn as well as a downturn. “When there’s a downturn, there’s a great deal of cost-cutting in companies, with employees losing their jobs. When the business cycle turns, there is some optimism, but companies are wary of taking any quick decisions, or hiring in a hurry,” says Menon.
Some, like Milind Sarwate, group CFO and chief human resources officer at Marico believes that both during an upturn as well as a downturn, there is an “over-reaction” when it comes to hiring patterns, with companies hiring more than they need and firing more than necessary. He too, feels that hiring patterns are a “lagging indicator of the economy.”
The good news is that the Asia-Pacific region, with 67%, has contributed the most to the job offers that candidates have received this year. “It’s but natural that Asia has fared well, as many Asian economies have recovered faster, and some never went through a stringent recessionary phase at all,” says Kamat.
“Clearly there are two worlds. On the one hand you have the developed countries where job creation is still an issue, on the other hand you have the emerging economies in the Asia and Pacific region where there’s still very strong economic growth,” feels Nitish Jain, president of the SP Jain Centre for Management in Dubai and Singapore. Jain believes that one possible reason for a rise in the hiring figures this year is that more Asians are taking the GMAT and getting more job offers. David Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC, told TOI in an interview that he, too, felt the future lay with emerging Asian economies.
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