MBA campus placements on a high

CHENNAI: Business graduates are on a high with campus placements enjoying a peak. With companies recovering from the recession, candidates from management departments across different colleges in the city are looking forward to earning higher salaries than their seniors when they started out.

Sudents from the Department of Management Studies at the University of Madras are confident of 100% placement this year. "This is normally the case. But two years ago, we registered only 80% placement. We have two placement sessions; the first one ends by December and the second goes on from January to March. More companies have approached the campus this year. L&T ECC, Coffee Day-Beverages section and Software Paradigm International, Mysore were a few of the new companies which came this year," said placement coordinator Pushpa Bhagyam.

With companies slated to come in the first week of March as well, representatives from the department said they do not yet have a fix on the highest salary offered this year. "However, the minimum salary has gone up from Rs 2.5 lakh last year to Rs 3.5 lakh this year. The highest salary given out last year was Rs 6.5 lakh. About 15 students of the batch of 84 have also opted for higher studies," she said.

The Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA) authorities said the quantity and the quality of profiles have gone up. "In addition to more companies visiting the campus, the quality of job profiles offered by them has also gone up. For instance, we are increasingly getting marketing profiles and more openings for the financial sector in areas like investment banking," said Jayaram K Iyer, professor of marketing, LIBA.

Attributing the increase in salaries to companies performing better, he said the highest salary on offer went up to Rs 15 lakh this year compared to Rs 11 lakh last year. The average salary had also risen from Rs 7.5 lakh to Rs 8.3 lakh in 2011, Iyer said.

Similar trends have been observed in the placement process of the Department of Management Studies at IIT-Madras where the average salary offered had increased from Rs 8.35 lakh in 2010 to Rs 9.23 lakh in 2011. The highest salary offered also rose from Rs 12 lakh to Rs 14 lakh this year.

According to the placement report of the department, 31% of the profiles offered last year were from the consulting sector with companies like Deloitte, KPMG and Avalon Consulting. This trend registered a change with firms from the supply chain management (SCM) domain and workforce management like Citibank, P&G, Daimler and SCOPE International, were the key recruiters this year, the report said.