MBA Specializations

With top entrances like CAT and XAT over , the biggest question that would be revolving in the aspirants mind is " Now that I am through which specialization to choose?" .Given that the choice made now will be mostly final and will drive career options and choices in post MBA life . In this regard I will share my experience with you. When I appeared for mba in 2012 , I secured 99.12 percentile in CAT (Verbal:95.xx ,Quants 99.xx) and secured calls from mdi ,fms,iit b , iit d,iit kgp, nitie , imt ghaziabad, 6 IIM s. While on the other hand with my snap score I secured calls from Schmrd, sibm and siib . In XAT I secured calls from XLRI BM, HR and XIMB (both Bm and HR). At that

point of time i had no clue of which among these colleges would give me a dream career because i did my bachelors in computer science engineering from NIT and for me it felt that all among HR , Fin , Operations had no relation with what i had known or done previously.

With multiple mutually conflicting inputs I was confused and searched the net on my own to get to the site http://www.iimjobs.com/ which is for people with experience to apply in their respective domains for top level positions. I was searching for eligibility in each discipline so that i make an informed choice for future. Having made a weighted choice from among the options i had , i found XLRI HRM was the one which suited the bill given that as per the site most top positions in HR could be applied with that eligibility and with some experience. Now 2 years down the line , and with some experience of the mba process , I feel some things need to be made clear to all aspirants specially ones who wish to know from which branch what options you have irrespective of which college they opt for.

I will start with HRM since i had maximum exposure to this function and try to correlate with other functions from it , from HRM you can get Sales roles (same role as u get if u opt for sales from Finance , Marketing , Ops), Strategic HR roles ( roles in which u make strategy for the firm includes decisions on Mergers and Acquisitions etc), Corporate HR roles ( roles like

creating policy documents and ensuring compliance etc) , Business Partner roles( sits in board mostly , coordinates activities between various HR functions), Consultant( which is more or less same role as u get in marketing , fin etc with same career progressions thereafter). As per study subjects , 2nd year is mostly electives u can choose same electives as chosen by fin or mark guys if u have interest in them but u have to choose some minimum number of core electives for your function this holds true for all other functions too. In case of fin then the major attraction would be investment banking ( please remember u need to have a good decent profile (good acads , experience) for this kind of role in leading companies).Switching from Finance to Core HR or from Core HR to finance is very rare unless it is a very very small company where everyone has to everything . Course content wise Finance will focus on Shares and bonds , marketing would focus on theories like HR which will deal with consumer perception and hence you can get marketing roles from HR specialization and same from marketing you can get into HR roles ( general management) and their multiple instances of the same in companies which has gen man roles. So this is more or less a peek into world of specializations , I hope this article answers at least a few of the queries revolving in your minds and will help in near future too for making some informed choices of various functions. Thank you and all the best for each of your careers !!
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