Digital and e.comm is the flavour of the season. With digital India being the new mantra and consumers taking to shopping online like a duck to water, digital-led companies are scrambling to hire talent in droves.
The digital boom has impacted the Ahmedabad-based MICA in a beneficial way. MICA, a strategic marketing and communication school which is entering its 25{+t}{+h} year, has seen hiring by digital companies sharply up in the two years since it introduced a specialisation in digital communications management.
President and Director Nagesh Rao (click here to see exclusive video interview with Nagesh Rao) points out that in the placement season for 2015, 30 per cent of its 160 students were hired by digital companies — 20 of the 85 companies that turned up to recruit this year were digital. Last year, 21 per cent (19 out of 90) of the recruiting companies were digital, and they hired 40 students of a batch of 153.
“Students are taking as many classes in the digital space as possible as recruitment has really picked up in this area,” says Rao.
Biggest hires
This year, software major Cognizant was the biggest recruiter in the digital space, followed by Amazon and Google. While all the students have been placed this year, apart from those in the digital stream, students were picked up by other media companies and FMCG companies. Significantly, nobody joined the advertising industry, to which many MBAs flocked to in the 1980s and 1990s. “The ad industry cannot afford our students as they pay only ₹4-5 lakh a year as a starting package,” points out Rao. The average salary package for this year was around ₹12 lakh.
Rao says that communications is still to take its place at the high table, even though, when recruiters come to hire, they say one of the top things they look for is communication skills.
“But they are focusing only on skills; for me it’s a strategy and a skill. If you strategically convert big data analytics into insights and translate it appropriately, communications then becomes key. It’s the whole idea and the thought process behind it.”
Matching skills
MICA’s Director says with the launch of its digital communications course, the institute is uniquely placed. Rao says one can talk of expertise in left brain skills like market research and hard data analytics and then there’s right brain expertise in the creative space.
“Nobody is doing the whole spectrum; so can we (at MICA) create the expertise to do the whole thing? As we look forward, we see the need for such a combination of skills will increase in banking to automotive sectors, where the notion of digital is going to play a critical role. We talk about communications as a soft skill, but it’s one of the hardest things to do, both professionally and personally,” says Rao.