At any given point in time, there are at least 500 faculty members of MBA coaching institutes,who are also simultaneously preparing for CAT. These ‘aspirants’ who have already taken CAT once and decided to take a shot at it once again get hired as faculty members for the section (CAT) which they have scored well and comfortable with. In some instances, they also don the hat of a center head at these institutes.
For the institutes, this works, since they have young, fresh minds to teach students at comparatively lower salaries and for the ‘aspirants’ it works better because it is free learning and teaching with some pocket money thrown in.
The teacher-aspirants
Manish Harodia completed his B.Com in 2004 and started teaching at an MBA coaching institute in Pune from the same year. He reasons for it was back then there were not many job opportunities for B.com grads. He says: I took up a job (at the coaching institute) more because I had no choice. Being a non-engineer 8-10 years back meant a job selling credit cards or insurance. He joined as faculty for the Data Interpretation (DI) section at the institute. At the same time,he was preparing for CAT himself. He got a final admit from IIM Kozhikode in 2006.
When PaGaLGuY asked him whether his teaching stint helped him get admission into the IIM, this is what he said. I was asked to find out the square root of 2000. It was done possibly to test my skills in handling such tough questions in a classroom. They were about to offer me a pen and a paper for solving the answer. But I answered it before they reached out for it. When asked how I managed to be so quick and accurate, I shared some of the concepts that I had learned through teaching a class and not from textbooks. I was able to convince the interviewers and explain them that how I helped the students in more ways than one and that is how, I believe I got selected.
At the top of Ayush Gupta’s priority list was devoting ample time towards his CAT preparation. That made him take the decision of leaving his IT job as soon as he realised that the working hours at his company were long and would not allow much scope for preparation. At present, he is working with Career Forum, Agra, an MBA coaching institute as a faculty of the Verbal Ability (VA) section.
Ayush says, I had got GD/PI calls from NITIE, Mumbai and Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon in mid-March, 2011 when I was working. It was my training period at the office and I could have managed to get leave for a maximum of a day an a half during the training period. I was working in Mysore and my interview venues were Mumbai and Delhi. Since I was unable to attend those interviews I decided to leave the job. And instead prepare for CAT-2011. I joined as a faculty for CAT coaching as I felt that it would keep me in good stead with the subject.
Ayush had taken CAT in 2009 and 2010 as well. He had scored 97.75 percentile in 2010 and 95.6 percentile in 2009. He had scored 99.86 percentile in the VA section in CAT 2010 and so, applied for the position of a VA faculty at Career Forum, Agra and got selected for the job. Ayush says, Teaching other people clears a lot of your own doubts as you yourself have to be well-informed in order to be able to guide others.
The aspirant-managers
Some of these aspirants teach students and also hold some managerial post at these coaching institutes. P Karthikeyan completed his B.E in 2009 and joined a call center. But, he left it within a few days after joining as he did not like his work. So, he joined Trichy Plus, an MBA coaching institute in Trichy, as a faculty of Quantitative Aptitude (QA) and DI. He was promoted to the post of a manager recently. He is also involved in franchising the coaching institutes to other states. And he is also a CAT-2011 aspirant.
Officials at some of the other IIMs, who did not want to be named, said that in most of the cases involving engineers, they considered working with some IT company as a relevant work experience. The most important thing involved in short listing the candidate would be their CAT score.
CET colleges and work experience
M A Khan, Director of Sydenham College of Management Studies, Mumbai says, If the company where the candidate is working is registered and is listed under any stock exchange, we consider it as work experience and marks are allotted with a maximum of 2 for more than three years of work experience.
Dr. Suresh Ghai, Director General, K. J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research adds: This kind of teaching at coaching institutes help these aspirants in preparing for the entrance free of charge, in fact, they get paid for it as well. They might gain some confidence out of this but for us, it is not any relevant work experience.