Students who have been placed with leading companies. Pix: Bhola Prasad

Jamshedpur, April 9: After the bull run of the annual campus recruitment, it was the turn of one-year general management programme (GMP) students of XLRI to strike it rich.

Reaching an all-time high, the general management programme, a one-year full-time management programme, concluded a successful season of placements for its 2008 batch, with its students fetching an average salary of Rs 17.80 lakh per annum — an increase of 20 per cent from last year — while the highest domestic offer stood at Rs 33.8 lakh. The average international offer was $1,30,000, once again an increase of 30 per cent from last year.

As many as 54 companies visited the campus this year against last year’s 23 and made 101 offers to 53 students who comprised the batch-size.

“The batch has been offered plum roles like assistant vice-president (finance), director, associate director, AGM (operations), chief manager, managing consultant, strategic account manager and client solutions manager. This highlights the potential of the participants to don middle and senior management roles,” said Madhukar Shukla, a senior professor and chairperson of external linkages at the B-school.

The placements also helped 30 per cent of the students change sectors where they had prior work experience. One participant opted out to start his own venture.

The placement season was held during the second week of February in Mumbai followed by rolling placements in March at Jamshedpur. “The process was aimed at offering flexibility to the students and recruiters to find the right fit, as the participants were potential middle and senior management candidates with job experience ranging from five to 15 years, with the average pegged at 7.5 years,” Shukla added.

Similar to the high-flying portfolios, the batch witnessed a good mix of participating companies from diverse sectors such as banking, energy, IT, consulting, manufacturing, steel, real estate and telecom. Some of the top recruiters included ArcelorMittal, Reliance, Jindal Steel, DLF, Tata Communications, Cairns Energy and L&T.

“With two years of organised placement support from the institute, the one-year GMP course has firmly established itself as a source of quality talent. There were a number of recruiters who personally expressed extreme satisfaction with the quality of the participants. These positive comments reinforce our belief that we are doing things right as far as our one-year programme goes,” said chairperson of placements at XLRI Uday Damodaran.