Apart from a dedicated course for executives called PGPX, in general, experienced professionals have been occupying more seats than students without work experience when it comes to getting admitted in Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad (IIMA). 

Though the number of those with work experience remain far greater than freshers in admissions to the PGP course, percentage of professionals in the entry batch have been on a slow decline over the last three years. 

Admissions by experienced professionals declined from 64.65% (254 students) in 2015-17 and 64.91% (257 students) in 2016-18 to 57.78 % (233 students) for 2017-19 batch, but professionals continued to occupy a major part of seats at IIM-A. 

Commenting upon the data, Dr Apratim Guha, Chair, PGP - Admission, said, "In our PGP admissions we look at the quality of work experience of a candidate along with other attributes. We do not award any credits to candidates for just being "experienced", as we believe it is the quality of work that matters the most." 

"From our point of view, there is very little real difference between a candidate who does not have any work experience and a candidate with a few months of work experience. It is only a matter of semantics to call such a candidate an experienced professional," Guha added. 

Guha said, "Depending upon the quality of experience, therefore, some variation in the numbers and percentages are possible in year-to-year comparisons." 

Stressing that the seeming decline in numbers of experinced professionals was insignificant, Guha said, "Even if we just look at significant work experience, say two years or above, that percentage has not changed much this year: 20.45% last year to 18.48% this year. Correspondingly, for the group with experience of 3 years or above, the percentage has changed from 5.81% to 5.32%."

"Average experience of the batch was 20 months last year, and it is 21 months this year; so there is hardly any change there, either," Guha added.

According to records of admission committee of IIM-A, around 58% professionals get entry into Post-Graduate Programme (PGP) and 42% students were those without work experience. In the PGP batch of 2017-19, 233 out of 395 students (57.78%), who had earlier worked from 1-60 months, got admissions.

Among these experienced professionals in 2017-19 batch, 24% had worked for around two years while 13% had worked between two to three years before attending IIM-A.