Army officers enter corporate battleground

Looking for lucarative options, a batch of 22 Armed forces officers, enrolled for the post graduate course in business management at an institute in Mumbai are now planning to move into the corporate milieu.

Companies, coming to the institute for placement are offering them roles in operations, marketing project/programme management, IT, strategic planning, supply chain management, HR and facilities management, with excellent compensation.

For the past four years, since the inception of the course, the response to the placement programme of the PGCBM-Defence Batch has been overwhelming, dean executive defence programme at the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies M C Agarwal said.

"Feedback from the industry indicates that they are doing extremely well in various levels of management", he said.

The curriculum of the PGCBM is similar to the executive programmes in management and emphasis is on concepts of analytical knowledge for managerial effectiveness and integrates their varied experience with the skills required to excel in the corporate world.

"The present batch comprises of officers selected from Army, Air Force and Navy and are thorough professionals with high degree

of discipline and excellent leadership qualities.

"They are highly qualified and include commandos, doctors, engineers, vets and lawyers with experience ranging from 5-25 years," a defence spokesperson said.

"Several of them have already been promoted to higher levels of responsibility and received acclaim for their performance in corporate jobs," he added.

"In the past, over 200 officers, after graduating from NMIMS, have got both domestic and international offers with salary packages in the range of Rs 10-30 lakhs (Rs 1-3 million)," a course participant Col Sanjeev Anand said.

"This course has been extremely helpful for my transition into management," said Lt Col HS Multani, regional manager (west) of Kingfisher Airlines.

"The programme sets us at par with executive management programmes in other top business schools in the country, said Lt Col Sachin Virkar, associate vice president-talent acquisition (west), of IT major Wipro.