The Hindu Business Line : Where techies score high

From playing the role of domain specialists where they are trained to analyse the business needs of their customers to even handling hardcore technical projects - IT companies have been looking at B-school graduates to handle their business from a different perspective.

"A technical person, with an MBA degree is what we ideally look for. While his technical background helps him to handle the project per se, his business background enables him to understand the needs of the customer service him better," says R. Chadrashekhar, Senior Vice-President, Operations, Cognizant Technologies Ltd.

An engineer from REC Trichy and an IIIM-Bangalore graduate, he says his educational background has helped him immensely to understand business situations better and translate them into creating better value-added technical solutions for his clients. He started off with Tata Consultancy Services soon after he passed out from IIM-B, where he worked as a Project Manager and has been with Cognizant since its inception in 1994.

"My first assignment as a Project Manager in TCS was to develop a foreign exchange dealing system for a software company in the UK, where apart from my technical background, my business school education came in very handy, as I had to understand the foreign exchange market well to develop a solution," he says, adding that his MBA background helped him to develop a structured approach to problem solving.

Chandrashekhar says Cognizant offers immense growth opportunities to B-school graduates. "These graduates rate us high because of the various career paths we offer to our employees."

The company recruits only from the Top six B-Schools in India - the IIMs from Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Lucknow and Bangalore, XLRI and Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.

The company 40 management graduates from these campuses this year, with a starting salary of Rs 7.5 lakh per annum. As a policy, it prefers management graduates with a technical background experience.

As far as job opportunities are concerned, Chandrashekhar says that a B-school graduate with an inclination for hardcore technology can either take charge of a project, or exposed to domain specialisation, which is a more research-oriented profile. "We train our employees in various industry verticals such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing and logistics, so that they have in depth knowledge of a particular business vertical and are able to know about the kind of problems that industry is undergoing, the regulations prevalent there and therefore the nature of software solution required," he says.

He adds that a domain specialistis also supposed to find out business opportunities in his particular domain, and his B-school training comes in really handy here as he is trained to understand the business scenario and the existing competition . "He starts as a business analyst, then becomes a client partner and then goes on to become a practise head," he adds.

Apart from domain specialisation, the other opportunities which Cognizant and most other IT companies offer to B-school graduates are in the region of marketing and customer development, business requirement analysis, business development, opportunity assessment, on-site relationship management, corporate development, mergers and acquisition assessment, change management and business integration.

Is IT more challenging than FMCG?

This senior executive feels that FMCG companies have a set pattern of functioning whereas IT companies don't follow a set pattern. "That's where the challenge lies. With technology, business needs of customers and the regulatory environment changing almost everyday, an IT professional has to be on his toes constantly."

Can a B-school graduate who starts off in an IT company move to a FMCG?

Chandrashekhar admits that after an IT stint, it is quite difficult for an MBA to fit into the FMCG scenario. , "But a domain specialist specialising in the insurance of financial service sector, for instance, stands a good chance of moving into an insurance or financial services company."

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication

Stories in this Section
Is Brand MBA overrated?

Are MBAs delivering?

Where techies score high

Aspiring to be world class

A mixed bag

Lost in the woods...

Time for introspection