Mgmt programmes score with expats

When Hak Soo Kim, a 33-year old Korean engineer from Seoul, was asked to relocate to India following his company's bagging of a steel project in Orissa, the first thing he did was to search online for an executive management course.

The search threw up choices like the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A)'s one year Post Graduate Programme in Management for Executives (PGPX).

Kim is among a growing number of foreign executives who had not heard of Indian management institutes till recently but couldn't ignore the numerous articles on the web about PGPX placements and positive recommendations from Indian colleagues.

A critical factor which helped him make the decision was the course fee. On an average, top B-schools in India charge around Rs 13 lakh-Rs 15 lakh for the one year executive management programme. The fees is nearly double that in well-known executive management schools in the US, Europe and West Asia.

Like Kim, there are other expatriate students in executive programmes who prefer the placement offers at IIM-A and Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad over executive programmes in Asia.

For the first batch of PGPX, the average domestic salary offered was Rs 24.65 lakh and overseas salary was $135,000. While 42 students took up offers from Indian companies, 14 chose foreign assignments. The highest salary offered was Rs 60 lakh and $250,000 respectively.

Fifty-four companies participated in the placement process and 135 offers were made. At ISB, the average domestic salary was Rs 15.03 lakh with the highest domestic offer being Rs 43.91 lakh. The highest international salary was $269,000 (Rs 1.18 crore).

"Typically, every batch that comes into these institutes is encouraged to contact the alumni and their companies to send feelers for their final placements," said Dhiraj Bakaya, an Australian executive from the banking sector, who joined IIM-A's PGPX on the advice of a family member, an IIM alumnus.

Executive programmes have not been marketed as much as the regular courses as these are recent additions to the curriculum. IIM-A had held road shows to market PGPX in the UAE and China, and most of the publicity was word of mouth.

ISB participated in a World MBA tour in the US and UK. It also invited foreign students to visit its campus in Hyderabad.

Funding however is an issue. For the first batch of PGPX at IIM-A, the institute is said to have spent close to Rs 50 lakh, of which a major part was spent on issuing advertisements in newspapers.

An official at a top B-school said, "Even if we want to create better brand recall for our executive programme overseas, we don't have the kind of funding that schools in the US and UK earmark even for subtle marketing."