Does BPO experience count during MBA interviews ?

Well I have been working in the BPO industry for around 24 months now . I had been asked recently by a CAT aspirant on whether he should take up a job in the BPO industry since he was not sure of getting into IIMs this year which requires atleast 98.5 %ile in CAT. He wanted to work for a while and then try for IIMs again. My reply followed.

First of all, if one is able to get 90 - 95 %ile in CAT/ XAT you may still end up in good schools like TAPMI , XIME , NIRMA etc. However if one does not want to get into these schools and want to work in a BPO and write CAT next year to get into IIMs then it would not be a great decision . The fact remains that the BPO industry does not normally provide great job profiles which is essential when one tries to impress during those MBA interviews. During MBA interviews we need to compete with say a CA who has a workex of say 2 years in Andersen Consulting or an Engineer who has been a project lead in Infosys for past one year . At that time a guy with workex from Wipro Spectramind or IBM Daksh would not be preferred. However there have been few examples who have managed to get excellent cat%iles and gain entry into top BSchools. But then there are exceptions everywhere.

However not all the BPOs are the same. For example a company called Evalueserve does a lot of high end BPO work and it can be actually termed as a KPO. Similarly getting to work in the Equity Research or Derivatives team of companies like JP Morgan Chase , Eserve would add a substantial value to your profile. The basic funda is getting a good job profile that is a value addition to your existing sets of skills and also which can be used to climb the corporate ladder.

Look at the current trends and one gets the feeling that MBA is hyped. There are many options for a graduate to carve his or her career path. One of the options could be opting to pursue a part- time MBA from a reputed institute or gain entry into Banks as Probationary Officers through their banking examinations. At end of the day we all want to have that bitch called " SUCCESS ."