Gen-Y in no hurry to jump on the MBA bandwagon!

Garima Upadhyay Rawat

Gen-Y is asserting their career choices like never before. Be it setting up ventures of their own or taking a sabbatical, they are daring to tread the path less travelled. Case in point is that of management graduates shunning MBA degrees for a year or two to garner ample work experience and only then take a plunge!

Piling degrees one after the other is passé, proves the data for CAT 2012 registrations which has seen good enough hike in the number of candidates with work experience. Prof SSS Kumar, convenor of CAT 2012 reported an increase of 43% in the number of registered candidates with work experience of 2-3 years. Till last year, the balance was tilted more in favour of freshers or candidates with work experience of less than six months.

One of the reasons for the sharp rise in the number of candidates with work experience can “be that probably undergraduate management students are getting good job offers,” opined Prof Kumar. A look at the placements of premier colleges offering Bachelor of Business Studies/ Administration (BBS/BBA) supports his observation.

Sonia Sareen, placement coordinator at Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies (CBS), a constituent college of the University of Delhi, informs, “The current season opened very well at CBS with Google visiting the campus for the first time and it opened the season with a mammoth 14 offers! On the same day, our regular recruiter - Bain Capability Centre extended four offers at a record Rs 9.8 lakh per annum. This year, seven companies have completed placement process at the college and have extended 75 offers to date at an average package of around Rs 5.6 lakh per annum. A special mention needs to be made about four recruiters that have each picked 14 students - these are - Google, McKinsey, The Smart Cube and Ernst & Young. The mood in the campus is upbeat since there are many more companies yet to conduct their recruitment drives.”                                                                                                 

Last year, the college registered the highest package at Rs 10.8 lakh per annum offered by Futures First followed by Bain Capability Centre offering a package of Rs 9.6 lakh per annum, which were among the highest packages offered to students in the University of Delhi. Ernst and Young and The Smart Cube recruited the maximum number of students. The average package for the year stood at Rs 5.5 lakh per annum. 

Akash Gupta, an alumnus of CBS, is quite happy with his first job. Ask him why he opted for a job and not a postgraduate degree and he says, “The BBS curriculum can easily be called a ‘mini MBA’. After graduating with a BBS degree, I wanted some work experience to understand the corporate culture better. Anyways, doing an MBA is not on my mind because I plan to take the civil services exam in the near future. But, a lot of my friends from college have opted for jobs and are not taking any management examinations.”

However, the decision to opt for a management degree after graduation remains a subjective choice and depends on individual goals and career charts. However, the trend of students opting to have a substantial work experience spells good news for B-School classrooms. Many directors have in the past said that a large pool of candidates with work experience would lead to enriching classroom discussions and debates. It will help uplift the standards and quality of imparting management education in B-Schools.

Do you think this move is in the right direction and will help place India on the global map when it comes to management education? Tell us what you think.