IIMA - MBA Career and Placement

How we help you get there?

To say that IIMA graduates “get there” is misleading. Actually, IIMA graduates get everywhere. Organisations looking for recruits who are ready to step in and take up responsibilities from Day One are scouting the graduating class even before the official placement process begins.

Mentorship and Industry Insights

Many student clubs on campus are oriented toward specific management areas and they help students prepare and strategize to meet their career goals. Throughout the year these clubs frequently invite industry leaders for informal talks. Insights, anecdotes, an insider’s view of specific organisations and functions … these interactions are invaluable for students seeking a fuller picture of their chosen career path. And there is always the very good chance that when placement time rolls around this same speaker may be back on campus as a recruiter.

Professional clubs are all about empowering their members to access resources, make decisions, seek support, and improve their skills.

Networking

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The IIMA Network

IIMA alumni number more than 40,000; they are spread across the globe and their careers span multiple industries and functions. Best of all, they retain that sense of camaraderie that they enjoyed when they were students on the IIMA campus. They remain ready to guide, assist and share their knowledge with one another throughout the entire career journey. For fresh graduates, it’s a great feeling to know that they will find IIMA alumni everywhere and their seniors will to help get them where they want to go.

The IIMA Alumni Association is a ready source of career-related support whether a fellow alumnus is navigating the entry-level job search process, exploring new career pathways, or searching for their next challenge.

Summer Internships

Through internships, IIMA students gain new skills, hone existing capabilities and reach insights through experience.

At the end of the first year, during the months of April, May & June students intern for eight to ten weeks with organisations of their choice. Through summer internships students gain first-hand experience in a particular industry. These weeks are integral to the Post-Graduate Programme (PGP) and perform the important function of providing opportunities to apply —and challenge — ideas and techniques imbibed in the first year. As an intern, the student gets a chance to innovate and gets a close look at market needs. As their months of internship draw to a close, most students have a clearer idea about the area of specialization they will take up in the second year.

The summer internship also has an academic component:

Internship culminates with a report on the summer assignment which the student prepares and presents it to the organization where they have been working before they register for the second year. The requirement of making a formal presentation about the project to the company ensures that sufficient rigour and discipline are brought in to this exercise.

Summer internships have typically been diverse, challenging, and intense learning experiences. Over the past six decades thousands of organisations of all types have accepted IIMA students as summer interns. Increasingly, a number of international companies have seen the value of this exercise and have collaborated with the Institute. For a company, the internship is a chance to evaluate an intern over a long period in a real business situation and make pre-placement offers based on this evaluation. A number of companies have used these internships as a key source for full-time hires.

Placement/ Recruitment Process

Final Placement

During January and February each year the best companies in India and the world visit the campus year after year searching for the best talent in the graduating class. Having reached key positions in top corporates worldwide, the Institute’s alumni help build a sustainable competitive advantage for organizations that choose to recruit students from our campus. Because as freshly placed recruits have been found to consistently live up to the organisations’ expectations, demand for the Institute’s graduates is high. This high demand has persisted for many years.

At the same time, the individual candidate’s level of work experience has been rising with every batch. Increasingly, IIMA Students are opting for more diverse job profiles. This has been clearly seen during the Final Placements in the past few years.

IIMA has decided to move away from a day-based system to a cohort-based system. The new system is designed with the stated objective of providing a better student-recruiter fit. The process, along with many other changes in the design, allows recruiters to evaluate students over a longer duration while giving them more time to delve into the various career options.

Lateral Placements

Lateral placements happen over an extended period in the final term for students having substantial work experience with firms offering higher than entry-level positions.

Encouraging Entrepreneurship

IIMA also encourages its students to take up Entrepreneurship as a career. This is reflected in the kind of electives offered in the second year as well as the help provided to budding entrepreneurs. There is an in-house incubation centre called CIIE that hosts several startups. Currently, students are allowed two-year entre leave to try out their ventures. Should it run into rough weather, they can come back and participate in the Institute placements through the "Placement Holiday" programme

Final Placement Process

Corporate Presentations

Early Jan-Mid Feb

Submission of Resumes

Mid Jan-Mid Feb

Shortlisting

Early Feb-late Feb

Preprocesses & Interviews

Mid Feb-Mid March

IPRS

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The Indian Placement Reporting Standards (IPRS) is an effort towards standardizing B-school placement reports. This initiative taken by IIM Ahmedabad and contributions made by the various stakeholders like media, recruiters and other B-schools have resulted in designing a comprehensive Placement Reporting Standard. The standards designed not only assure the privacy of the individual level data or information but also specify the format for reporting aggregate statistics which would satisfy the information needs of the different stakeholders.

Why IPRS?

The necessity for such an initiative was felt as applicants gather recruitment information using the placement reports and rankings put forward by different B-schools, media and ranking agencies. Individual B-school have different formats of placement reports. The lack of standardization and clarity may lead to the misinterpretation of the data and lead to wrong decision making. Therefore there was a need for such standards to be introduced so as to make the data on the placement reports more comparable and reliable.

View All IPRS reports here: iima.ac.in/iprs/placement-reports

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