IIT Bombay Placement: 5-year data reveals two non-core sectors as major recruiters

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“Analytics, which has been in the shadow of IT/software for a long time, has now emerged as a favourite among students. It offers them a wide variety of roles, such as data scientists, strategists, etc. These roles demand strong mathematics skills and pattern recognition abilities which are abundant in IIT graduates,” states the paper authored by Namit Agrawal, Sailakshmi Sreenath, Shishir K. Jha and Anurag Mehra of the Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay.

More significantly, analytics and consulting constitute more than half the jobs offered to Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Metallurgical Engineering students. This echoes the larger finding of the study that over 60% of the institute’s graduates, except those from Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering, took up jobs in sectors unrelated to their branches of study between 2014 and 2018.

Analytics roles pay an annual median salary of 10.5 lakh, and placements in the consulting sector offer 8.5 lakh (see Graph 2). However, the sector-wise median package is consistently the highest (Rs 16.37 lakh) in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector for all years, followed by the research and development sector (Rs 12.67 lakh) and finance (Rs 12 lakh). But the sectors with the highest median salary packages make relatively fewer offers during the placement season, states the paper published in the Current Science journal last month.

For compensation benchmarking in the study, the researchers used the median salary instead of the mean salary since the latter can be misleading if there are outliers in the data set. “The mean is influenced significantly by outliers such as very high or very low salaries, and may not be representative in such situations… Extraordinarily high or low salaries, which only a few students earn, do not influence the value of the median salary significantly,” the authors state in the paper.

According to the paper, the correlation between the highest salary and the median salary is not strong. “For most sectors, the median salary is in the narrow range of 800,000–1,100,000 INR, while the maximum salary ranges from 700,000 to 4,500,000 INR. This indicates that even though a few students get exceptionally high offers, the majority of them get much smaller packages,” states the report.

That apart, a comparison of the sector-wise salary distribution with and without Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) students shows a significant difference, indicating a preference for CSE students in certain sectors; thereby also making it a most sought-after branch at the IIT Bombay.

“After excluding the jobs opted for by CSE students, a significant decrease is seen in the median salary of traditional core sectors, i.e. engineering and technology, research and development and IT/software. This suggests that salaries in these sectors for non-CSE students are lower compared to CSE students,” states the report. For example, the annual median salary for research and development roles was over Rs 12lakh, including CSE graduates. But upon their exclusion, it dropped to a little over Rs 9 lakh per annum. Almost similar observations are recorded in the IT/Software sector too.