Little by Little

I remember talking to one of my former classmates a few weeks ago. He was pretty much bummed out because he felt that taking the MBA at the Asian Institute of Management was a good career move for his part, except that he took it at the inopportune time.

To be honest, his statement was quite accurate-- we graduated at a time when global companies are cutting jobs by the thousands and "freeze hiring" re-emerged as one of management's favorite buzzwords. We took the blunt of the global economic crunch as the shiny jobs that normally waited from MBA grads dried up like a well in the Sahara desert.

I'd often have chats similar to the one I just described with my former classmates in the first couple of months of the year. The theme was almost always the same-- the space for jobs for MBA folks were contracting and the lament was that you could count with one hand the people in our class who had pre-placement offers.

But things are slowly changing. (emphasis on the "slowly")

In the last month, offers started trickling in, with really good ones springing up. More of us have found corporate gigs and there are some who took the entrepreneur route. The situation is improving, but not so much-- if opportunities are being rationed, then we just have to wait our turn.