In 2011, IIM Indore made great headway with their attempt of reinventing the undergraduate management education system in India. It launched its ‘Integrated Programme in Management (IPM)’, a 5 year programme targeted at the students who have passed 10+2. Today, IIM Indore’s IPM Programme is one of the most accepted programmes of recent times. Consider this; in 2015 around 39,500 aspirants appeared for the Common Law Entrance Test (CLAT), an exam being conducted since 2008. In just four years of its inception, IPM mustered the interest of as many as 19,000 candidates for the IPM Entrance Test in 2015. Just numbers alone might not seem drastically different. However, factor into the picture that Law as a career option after High school has been around for decades, whereas IPM (Management course from an IIM right after high school) is a novel idea.

The programme consisting of 15 terms spread over a period of 5 years provides holistic management education. In the first three years, the course is an amalgamation of social sciences, commerce, computers and science. The fourth year is when the IPM students join the PGP first year students and learn all the core management subjects along with them.

Mr. Ranjeet Nambudiri, Faculty at IIM Indore and Chairperson of the IPM shares the philosophy behind the programme. In conversation with Career Launcher, Mr. Nambudiri said, “The IPM was launched with the objective of creating management graduates with diverse skills and knowledge base like social sciences, mathematics and economics”. He further added “We are extremely happy to witness the manifold rise in applications in IPM. It indicates that the programme has been very well accepted by the market”.

IPM comes across as a programme that aims at creating leaders instead of just ‘managers’. It’s akin to putting a class 12thpass out student into an incubator. This incubator nourishes the student’s thinking and his/her outlook towards the world. “The participants of this programme would have a wider perspective and hence would be able to integrate diverse viewpoints required of management graduates. Furthermore, it gives IIM Indore an opportunity to inculcate social consciousness and awareness about ethical practices at an early age”, Mr. Nambudiri believes. Here, it’s also worth mentioning that the lack of work experience of the IPM students is hardly and issue. “In any case, 40-50% of the MBA participants are also freshers with little or no work experience”, highlights Mr. Nambudiri. In fact, our sources tell us that about 3 students of the top ten students of the final year batch at IIM Indore are the IPM students.

Many IIM alumni relinquish their high paying jobs in order to pursue their dream of becoming an entrepreneur or working in fields that excite them while quite a lot of IIM students skip their placements for their same.  “One of the most important things to realize is what makes you happy? The earlier one realizes it and works towards it, the more the satisfaction. Currently most students enter an IIM to get those high-paying jobs without worrying about what they really want to do. 2 years pass by without a blink of the eye and you still haven’t assessed where you want to be. IPM provides you the opportunity of being around the best brains in high voltage and high stress situations for 5 years. It provides you the time to think and decide where it is that you want to go and what makes you happy. That is its biggest USP”, says Gautam Bawa, MBA Product Head, Career Launcher and IIM Calcutta alumni who quit a high paying trading job overseas to fulfill his first love of joining the Education field in India. “Today I’m not just working in an organization. I’m an entrepreneur heading a vertical and make my own mistakes and learn from them. There is no stress and the working environment is entrepreneurial in nature”, further adds Gautam Bawa.

In the IPM, students have enough industry interaction in the form of a social internship after the 3rd year and a business internship at the end of the 4th year. This takes their leadership skills to an all new level hence instigating the hidden entrepreneur in them. It also gives them enough time to make an informed decision of the field they want to pursue. Mr. Nambudiri shares a piece of advice with all the IPM aspirants. According to him, “There are interesting career choices available to the students today – one needs to identify what is his / her true calling before choosing a career. One needs to be clear why s/he is joining a management course”

The IPM’s success and industry acceptance would be best assessed only once the first batch of the IPM sits for the placements next year. In all probabilities the IPM and PGP, IIM Indore’s flagship programme, will have common placements hence increasing anxiety among the students about the increase in competition in grabbing the campus opportunities. However, Mr. Nambudiri believes that it’s too early to address the issue. He says, “We do not see this as a bottleneck in the placement process. In any case the objective is to leverage synergies from both programmes”.
The Business world and the industry are eagerly waiting to welcome these prodigies who are rigorously honed in IPM’s well charted curriculum. With the IPM itself being no less than an innovation, innovation would be something the industry would certainly expect out of the IPM clique.

“With around 19,000 aspirants taking the test within the fourth year of the course’s initiation, it won’t be a surprise if the number rises to 50,000 within the next 4-5 years. IPM is here to stay and will probably be a model that the other leading B-Schools might be looking at in the near future. One thing’s for certain, this can surely help solve the academic diversity issue at the IIMs”, says Gautam Bawa.

Interested IPM aspirants can register for upcoming seminars in Delhi, Gurgaon and Faridabad at bit.ly/1JbkE8e