New Delhi: Amid concerns over falling employment opportunities in the country, several top B-schools, including some Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), have reported strong summer placements for their students with sales and marketing, finance and consulting being the top recruiters.
While IIM Lucknow and IIM Kozhikode completed their summer placements within four days, XLRI Jamshedpur achieved 100% placement in just two days.
The Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) reported completion of its summer placements with double-digit growth in average stipend offered.
Mumbai-based SPJIMR (earlier called SP Jain Institute of Management and Research) too reported good response from companies with a 24% rise in the average stipend.
Though summer placements are not the same as final placement, they are indicative of the job environment these campuses are likely to witness in a couple of months for their outgoing batches of students.
They come amid concerns that job creation has been impacted by policies like the goods and services tax (GST).
In summer placements or internships, students work for 8-10 weeks to gain experience that often translates into full-fledged job offers to many of them.
“Buoyed by optimistic investors, the Indian economy is in good shape and our summer placements have registered unprecedented success this year, both in terms of monthly stipend offered to the students and the list of companies visiting our campus,” Kulbhushan Balooni, director (in charge) of IIM Kozhikode said in a statement.
“The healthy economic environment has helped IIM Lucknow maintain its status as a top recruiting destination and has attained 100% placement for its largest batch of 459 students,” the B-school said, adding that it has 40 new companies in its pool of recruiters in 2017, as against 32 in 2016.
At IIM Kozhikode some 100 recruiters made 359 offers and the average stipend has grown 25%. Though the school did not quantify the average stipend offered, it said the highest stipend offered was Rs3 lakh.
Similarly, XLRI said average stipend has gone up by 20% and at IIFT, it has gone up by more than 11%.
Institutes that have completed their summer placements said sales and marketing, consulting and finance were the top roles for which students were selected.
At XLRI, for example, the sales and marketing roles topped the charts with 25% share of recruitments, followed by finance with 20%. At IIM Lucknow, sales and marketing (35%), finance (25%) and consulting (20%) were the top profiles offered.
IIM Kozhikode reported over 30% of its batch going for sales and marketing.
At SPJIMR, consumer goods and the consumer durables sectors were the lead recruiters during the placement, with 34% of the batch getting placed in the sectors.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., Godrej Industries Ltd, Aditya Birla Group, Amazon India, Uber India, Cipla Ltd, American Express, Deutsche Bank, Walmart Labs, EY, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, ITC Ltd, Axis Bank, Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd, Airtel and Godrej Properties were the top recruiters across campuses.
Job shortage remains a bane of the economy. While a million people enter the workforce every month, the number of jobs created has lagged. Between 2011-12 and 2015-16, India created 3.65 million jobs a year, according to lobby group Confederation of Indian Industry.
Accelerating employment creation is crucial for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the centre as it heads into the next general election in 2019.
[“Source-livemint”]
