Out of the 15 foreign companies that had earlier registered for the placement at the IIM Lucknow, only a handful came to hire the students.

Rest of the foreign companies opted out of the placements saying that they will first watch the market trend and then they will decide on hiring students. The placement statistics, however, shows improvement from the last year. For example, as compared to last year when 280 students got 554 placement offers, this time 256 students have received 586 offers. It may be that only two to three foreign companies came to recruit students this time instead of the 7 companies that hired students last year, the number of offers have increased this year to 32 from the last year’s figure of 28.

“The placements are historic as there has been improvement in everything. Right from pre-placement offers, lateral placements offers to final placement offers. Even one of our students with around 16 years of experience has been taken as a Vice-President by the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group,” said Prof Pankaj Kumar, chairman the IIML placement cell. But he admitted that the picture would have been much better had the US economy not weakened. “The scene would have been much better in the absence of this sub prime crisis,” he added.

Like previous year, this year too the two sectors— financial and consulting—were in demand while there were hardly any takers for Information Technology.

“The trend started around four to five years back. Students are more concentrating on finance, consulting and sales rather than IT sector. It is for this reason, while 31 per cent of students have opted for finance, just seven percent opted for IT sector.”

There were some students like Ajay Chauhan who turned down a lucrative offer to become “derivative trader” or commodity future trader. “Other companies may offered me a better salary package but they were not giving me the profile that I was looking for. The coming days are of future marketing and thus I preferred to take the lowest package keeping the long term goal in mind,” Chauhan told The Indian Express.