The A List

The demand for top talent to manage change in a tech- and data-led world remains strong. Our top B-schools lend India Inc. a helping hand to grow in a fast-changing world.

- E. Kumar Sharma

INDIAN BUSINESS SCHOOL campuses are abuzz. It is that time of the year when, in many campuses, companies recruit summer interns, a route that more and more of them are taking to find potential employees instead of relying solely on the half-hour interviews during final placements. This year, as India Inc. gets ready to expand after years of surviving in a slow-growing economy and embraces technology and data to manage change, the buzz on B-school campuses is louder. Salaries, going by the final placement figures, are up – for instance, for the top 25 B-schools, the mean average domestic salary in 2018 was 16.98 lakh compared to 15.78 lakh in 2017. For the next 25, the figure for this year is 9.24 lakh compared to 8.46 lakh in 2017. Consultants are among the top favourites again – they hired one-third of the batch at IIM-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) – as more and more companies engage them to manage change and grow in the marketplace increasingly getting impacted by technology. So are banks, again looking to adopt latest technology and use big data to put years of slow growth behind them. Ecommerce, the most sought-after sector during the peak of the funding boom till a few years ago, seems to be getting back after a lull; it accounted for 10 per cent placements at IIM-A. And the IT sector, say placement heads, is all but missing, a reflection of muted demand despite all the focus around digital transformation for their clients.

Change on Campus