IIM graduates' salaries go through
the roof
M D Riti in Bangalore
Consider this:
- Average annual salary for IIM graduates in India this year: Rs 710,000-Rs 760,000.
- Average annual salary for IIM graduates placed abroad this year: $74,000-$120,000 (Rs 3.44 million-Rs 5.58 million).
Don't rub your eyes. This is no dream, but a hard fact.
If you are an engineer, and fortunate enough as to be one of the ninety-odd aspirants for every Indian Institute of Management seat, chances are you need never worry about business slumps and job freezes affecting workforces the world over.
Never mind the economic depression: you can still be hired at a starting salary of, say, Rs 100,000 a month. Stock options will be thrown in just to make you feel better still. And you might even get to pick your dream location anywhere in the world to work in.
Advantage techies
The techies might sneer that the IIMs are churning out MBAs who have forgotten everything about engineering and technology. Yet, the fact remains that many of these engineers might simply not care as they are being offered almost astronomical sums to use whatever skills they have been trained in at India's top management schools.
In these days of job market crises, that might well be all that matters to most people.
The IIMs themselves may cry themselves hoarse protesting that they are not tilting their entrance tests towards engineers, and that they cater to a variety of academic streams.
Be that as it may, year after year, a majority of every graduating class consists of engineers. The graduating class from IIM-Lucknow this year, for example, has 78 per cent engineers as against just 10 per cent commerce students, and arts students. Science students constitute the remaining 12 per cent.
Interestingly, though, students with some degree of work experience are more in number now. The average age of these young money-spinners is about 23-24 years, which is about right for an engineer with a year's work experience followed by two years at an IIM.
"Thank God for technology," smirks Amar Singh, first year student of IIM-Lucknow, as he watches his seniors take up plum jobs across the world.
"Otherwise, it would be tough for IIM graduates to keep in touch. This year, my seniors have been recruited by the best companies in the world, and will be working in the US, the UK, Australia, Belgium and Germany. Of course, many have consciously opted to work only in India, and have turned down offers from overseas," he says.
It gets better and better
The job markets in the US and elsewhere continue to do badly, and most organisations have clamped a recruitment freeze. But the 1,000-odd graduates who are passing out of the six IIMs this year seem to have picked up even more highly paid jobs than last year.
It is difficult to establish exactly what the average starting salary across all the six IIMs is for this year's graduating class. But a random look at the figures at two IIMs gives us a fairly clear idea.
At IIM-Bangalore, which is one of the older and more established of the six IIMs, the average salary was Rs 1.76 million a year. This figure entails the pay cheques of students placed overseas and in India.
The sky is the limit!
The average Indian salary for the IIM-B graduates was Rs 760,000 per annum as against Rs 550,000 last year. The student who got the lowest salary in this year's batch will clear Rs 360,000 a year!
The highest paid job was grabbed a student who went to England on an exchange programme and got himself an offer of 115,000 pounds a year from Deutsche Bank. Gaurang Agarwal thus bagged a Rs 7.7 million-a-year bonanza!
Last year, Saurabh Singh, a 23-year-old chartered accountant from Calcutta who passed through IIM-B got a job in Britain for 100,000 pounds a year.
As many as seven students were hired at salary packages of $150,000 per annum. Interestingly, as many as 13 of the 183 students who graduate this year from IIM-B at their convocation on March 14 kept right out of the placement process and interviews because they already had got excellent jobs.
Across all the IIMs, companies like McKinsey, Arthur Andersen, Price Waterhouse, Ernst and Young, and the Boston Consulting Group seem to have been large recruiters.
At IIM-Lucknow, the average salary of graduates this year was Rs 1.39 million, as against Rs 710,000 last year. The highest international offer made to a student was $77,000 plus stock options (last year it was $65,000 by the IT start-up Fatwire.)
The average salary for international offers was $74,000, excluding stock options. The average Indian salary was Rs 710,000, as against Rs 550,000 last year. The highest Indian offer was Rs 1.2 million this year, as against Rs 900,000 last year.
And who were the highest paying recruiters in India this time? HSBC offering Rs 1.2 million per annum followed by Accenture with Rs 950,000, Arthur Andersen with Rs 850,000 and Cognizant Technologies and ICICI with Rs 800,000.
Interestingly, sources at IIM-B reveal that companies like Ranbaxy and Britannia returned disappointed from this year's placements with nobody joining them!
Consulting firms followed by financial services and investment companies seem to have been the largest volume hirers.
Last year, in contradiction to the international trend of management grads preferring dot-coms and start-ups, most IIM hires were to the same sectors listed above.
Indian brains in big demand
Many Indians working for senior management consultancies and firms overseas pointed out to rediff.com last year that American and European companies were turning increasingly to Indian management grads from top-seeded institutes because their counterparts overseas no longer favoured these particular sectors, or were willing to come in at the lower entry level positions being offered to them.
The placement process has just been concluded at the IIMs at Calcutta, Bangalore and Lucknow. IIM-Ahmedabad is still completing the collation of its data. As long as IIM graduates continue to attract salaries that are so amazingly disparate from those being drawn by graduates of every other academic stream in India, there is little doubt that the rush for admission to these premier institutes will keep on growing.
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