GREAT LAKES INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT: PLACEMENT REPORT 2008

The placement season for the fourth batch of Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai ended on a high note and once again highlighted the increasing prominence of Great Lakes as one of the top B-Schools in the country. Students were jubilant with the kind of offers they got both in terms of remuneration as well as roles at the end of the current placement season. Interestingly, Great Lakes flagship one year PGPM course has been providing placements much better than many conventional two year courses and is steadily creating a name for itself among its much publicized peers.

Snapshot of Current Batch: 2007-2008
Keeping up with its reputation of providing business ready managers, Great Lakes current batch has an average work experience of 37 months. The current batch at Great Lakes is one of the most diversified batches among B-Schools in the country as students have come from different industries right from IT, Medical, Consultancy, Marine, Education and even Defense.

Work experience of current batch

Profiles offered
Great Lakers were offered choicest of profiles by companies which were as diverse as Consulting, Investment Banking, Corporate Finance, Corporate Planning and Strategy, Product Management, Brand Management, Manufacturing, Supply Chain Management, Equity Research, Banking, Risk Management, Financial Modeling and Treasury. Senior positions like Associate Vice President and other fast-track leadership roles were the most-coveted profiles that were grabbed by Great Lakers.

Recruiters at a glance
Great Lakes saw an encouraging 40% jump in the number of recruiters over the last year’s number of 61 companies visiting for placements with about 27 new companies visiting Great Lakes. Some of the prominent recruiters in different fields who participated in the placement process at Great Lakes are:

Banking & Finance: HSBC, CITIBANK, KOTAK, Tata Capital, IL&FS, ABN-AMRO, India Bulls, IREVNA, Pioneer Investments Corporation

Manufacturing, Energy & Operations: Caterpillar, BAYER, Larsen & Toubro, Cummins, Genpact, TVS, Tata Communications, DSCL, BGR Energy, BIG FM, Reliance Retail, Infosys BPO, ITC Foods

Sales & Marketing: Reliance Retail, Godrej, Henkel, Tata Communications, Big FM 92.7, MARG Constructions, Coca Cola India, Reach Technologies, LG India, ConnectM Technologies, Shaadi.com

Consulting: KPMG, Technopak Consulting, Monitor Group (Grail Research), Frost & Sullivan, Accenture, Cap Gemini, Infosys, Mindtree Consulting, Wipro Consulting

IT/ITeS: Accenture, Cap Gemini, ADP, Wipro, TCS, Cognizant Technologies, Infosys, Mphasis EDS, CSC, HCL, Satyam, VistaSoft, ITC Infotech, 3i-Infotech, Inautix, L&T Infotech

Sector wise break up

Placement Snapshot

The Average salaries based on work experience of the current batch are as follows:

Less than or equal to 2 years of Work experience – INR 8.17 Lakhs p.a.
Between 2 to 4 years of Work experience- INR 9.52 Lakhs p.a.
Greater than 4 years of work experience – INR 12.1 Lakhs p.a.

The average salary of the offers made at Great Lakes for the PGPM program of 2007-2008 stands at INR 9.70 lakhs. Remarkably, more than 60 students have become millionaires at the end of the placement season!

Placement highlights
Great Lakes in its four years of existence has not only been growing at an exponential rate but is also being increasingly recognized as a B-school to reckon with. With the current placement season ending on a high note, the future of students at Great Lakes is looking increasingly bright.

GREAT LAKES, The choice of professionals!
Placements clearly demonstrated that how choosing GREAT LAKES has worked wonderfully well for entry as well middle level professionals. GREAT LAKES which considers professional full time work experience as highly desirable for its course has provided an economical alternative to those professionals who want a high professional return from their management course. Quoting specific instances, Shalini Chandran, who had prior experience at DE Shaw walked away with a coveted Banking role in HSBC with a 7 digit package. Students like Sahana.J.V., a software engineer, and Karthikeyan, an automobile engineer both having 10 months of work experience before joining the program have ended with offers well in excess of 10 lakhs from a leading bank and an international manufacturing company respectively. Even people in higher bracket experience, have rich praise for the 1 year PGPM experience at Great Lakes. Students with more than 5 years of work experience were able to get coveted roles such as Senior Manager, Senior Consultant, Business Development Manager etc. Srivas Ramgopal, who was a tech lead in an IT major and had a work experience of 6 years will now be joining a telecom company in a Senior Management role at an attractive package. Students were also offered better profiles and higher roles by their previous employers. Overall, students of Great Lakes just didn’t get better profiles in their previous industries but were also able to switch to new industries. Indeed an indication of the value added by Great Lakes in this one year.

Career shifts at Great Lakes
One of the interesting features about the placements this year has been the success of Great Lakes in providing career shifts to a large number of students. Close to 90 students out of a batch of 164 students have opted for a sector change from their previous sectors. This throws an interesting insight on how management graduates are willing to experiment and try out new things in this exciting phase of growing economy. Varun Sardana, a software engineer from TCS made the move to Investment Banking, grabbing offers from IL&FS and Vistasoft. Anil Daga, who was earlier with the Citigroup Services, has been offered to lead an Investment Banking wing at Pioneer Investment Corporation. Students were also able to make shift from core sectors. Ashfaque Vohra who came from manufacturing with more than 4 years of experience is now going to join the sales function of the leading consumer products major LG.

Impact of world renowned faculty
The support of world renowned faculty to Great Lakes has played key role in the success of placements. Great Lakes students have been taught by stellar line up of faculties like Prof. Bala V. Balachandran , Dr. Goldratt, Prof. Seenu Srinivisan, Dr. Marti Subramanian, Mr. T.N Seshan, Prof. Nirmal Gupta, Prof Paul Prabhakar, Prof. Anantha Nageshwaran, Mr. Santosh Desai and many more who come from reputed schools like Chicago Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, Kellogg School of Business, IIMs, NUS etc. The pedagogy of this stature is one of the prime drivers behind Great Lakes beating its last year’s record in spite of the ongoing IT slowdown, sub-prime crisis and downsizing by IT companies.

Needless to say, pursuing management course from Great Lakes has turned out to be a smart decision for these professionals and if placements are any indication to go by, then Great Lakes has truly arrived in the big league.

College URL: Great Lakes
Source: Glakes Placement Report 2008