Education
ISB Thinking about applying to the Indian School of Business? Then check out our recent Q&A with Mr. V. K. Menon, Senior Director of Placements at ISB for valuable information on career prospects for ISB grads post-MBA. Read on for an excerpt: Question: Can you explain how well ISB graduates are placed in terms of being work ready on the first day? Do ISB and companies that hire consider that the PGP is robust enough to deliver work-ready managers with minimal training? VK Menon: Let’s look at how we operate. The ISB Program is a one-year program. So right when we were setting up the school the question arose, should we go in for a one-year program or should we do a normal two-year program like many other business schools? The research we conducted showed that if people had more than three years of experience they were in a very advantageous position if they went in for a one-year program, and so we chose the one-year model. The tradeoff of the model is that in a typical two-year model, you get about 720 contact hours. These are hours which you spend in class with the professors, 720. In a one-year program, that is the one that is done by ISB, you have around 680 contact hours. So there is a tradeoff of about 40 contact hours, but the advantage is that you get back to work one year earlier.
So that’s how we formulated the design. Having formulated the design, the other thing which we had to do was that we had to do away with all the breaks....This one year is split up into eight terms and each term is one and a half months. In each term, you will do about four to five subjects which means that it’s a very tight program and the program rolls on term after term for one complete year. Now, the interesting fact here is that close to around 70% of the students who join the PGP Program of the ISB change their careers. They either change their function or they change their industry or they change their location or they change all the three. So the question which was asked becomes very important. How is it that we make these people ready to be operative from day one, how is that we prepare them not just on that curriculum but also on the get-ready-to-industry concept? Now for that we have a complete -- under the Career Advancement Services, we have a Learning and Development Department. The Learning and Development Department is headed by vertical specialists....So it is their role...to ensure that you take the right subjects, you go to the projects which you need to do. You may have to choose certain projects which are specifically designed for you. You may have to kind of go out and work with certain industries. You may have to do special sessions from industry experts who are brought in for getting you ready to go to market. So there's a whole set of activities which are done by the Learning and Development Department. This department is not in any way associated with the academics that go on. The academics is a stream by itself. The Learning and Development Department just ensures that the student is job ready, job fit for both the interview and for the job, if and when the job is given to you. So that’s the way in which we train students to be ready on day one. Going by feedback of companies which have been recruiting, and we’re very sensitive about feedback, we get back to the companies and we are in close touch with more than about 1,000 companies worldwide. So the feedback suggests that the graduates of ISB have performed exceptionally well when it came to really handling assignments post graduation. For the complete conversation, please check out the 2014 ISB Career Opportunities Post-MBA Q&A or listen to the audio file. You can also view our ISB B-School Zone for more information. To automatically receive notices about these MBA admissions chats and other MBA admissions events, please subscribe to our MBA events list. To listen to the Q&A recordings on-the-go,