Inter-Organisational mobility of Management Graduates of Selected Institutions in India

This paper provides the findings on inter-organizational mobility of management graduates (MGs) of selected institutions in India. The findings are based on 668 returns of mailed questionnaires that were sent to the alumni of six institutions, including the three national ones (Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, and Calcutta) who graduated during the years 1966 to 1977. Mobility has been defined on six dimensions: i) the number of organisations worked in the first year, ii) the number of organisations worked in the first three years, iii) the number of organisations worked in the first five years, iv) the minimum duration in an organization, v) the maximum duration in an organization, and vi) the average duration in an organization. On the first dimension, it is found that percentage of MGs who leave their first employer in first year (also called early leavers) is quite low (7.6%) and this is comparable to what is experienced in USA. However, additional 10% of MGs (a total of 18%) worked for one of the employers in their career for less than one year. Thus, the concept of early leavers needs to be redefined to include the latter category too. On the basis of dimensions (ii) to (vi) above, a very large proportion of MGs have been found to have stable careers (60 to 85%) and only a very low proportion of them could be termed as job hoppers (2 to 12%). These findings are comparable to those of MGs in US. We seek the considered views of the readers of this paper for sharply defining the categories of mobility so that the findings on career progress and mobility of the management graduates could be properly presented in the final paper. The last section of the paper contains a questionnaire for providing this information to the authors.