It’s safe to say that one of the major objectives of the students who decide to pursue an MBA is to get a good job. Placements are those times in B-Schools when everyone wants to land one of the most coveted job offers which have been rolled out by companies visiting those B-Schools. There are Summer Placements precisely three months after one joins a B-School and there are Final Placements towards the end of the second year of MBA. Needless to say, both of these placement seasons hold a high degree of importance; but the former are more important than the latter.
Everyone in a B-School is quite familiar with the term ‘PPO’. PPO or Pre-Placement Offers are rolled out by companies well before the Final Placements for the students who interned with them during summer and with whose performance they are satisfied with. There are companies which recruit candidates through Pre-Placement Offers only, and they do not come for campus recruitments during Final Placements. This is because they find it easier to recruit candidates by monitoring their performance, their reliability and their dedication to the firm over the course of their two-month summer internship. This is one of the reasons which highlights the value of a PPO.
Looking at it from the perspective of a candidate, the summer internship experience offers a close view of the functions of a firm with hands-on experience on a particular domain. Also, the placement seasons in B-Schools tend to be quite stressful, which is why most people dread the phase where they have to sit for another round of placements in the second year of MBA. A PPO, in such cases, guarantees the candidates a job well before the placements and saves them from the stress that they might have to face later.
From the point of view of a B-School, PPOs offered to the candidates of a particular B-School on account of their performance during their summer internships increase the reputation of a B-School because it is somehow also on account of the students of the B-School being able to apply their knowledge that they gained after one year of MBA that they are being offered a PPO. It shows that the students of the B-School are groomed well to face the corporate life that awaits them at the end of two years.
This is how valuable PPOs are, which is what makes the Summer Placements more important than Finals. Nevertheless, it is okay when candidates might have landed a summer internship in a domain that they might not be targeting. This would offer them a new experience of something they were not willing to try, and who knows, they might even end up liking it. Summers provide the students with an opportunity to present themselves to the best of their ability after just being three months into an MBA program. Therefore, the guarantee of a job with a company whose work culture, environment, functionalities and people one might already be familiar with during the course of summer internship makes a PPO all the more valuable.