Everyone wants to have a fulfilling career. But what do you think you need to have it? While there are many possible answers, in my opinion there are at least two things you should have.

• First, you should follow your heart. Following your heart means working on something that matters to you. It’s something that you do not because of money, but because of love and care.
• Second, you should live your fullest potential. It’s not enough just to do what matters to you. You should also grow your capacity to the fullest. I don’t know about you, but I feel deep satisfaction whenever I know that I’ve done my best.

The key to living your fullest potential is developing your skills. You can only live your fullest potential if you always develop your skills so that you can give better and better value over time.

Here are few tips for developing your skills:

1. Learning skill

Learning skill should be the first skill you develop because it greatly helps you develop other skills. An essential ingredient to have good learning skill is motivation. If you are motivated to learn about a subject, it will be much easier for you to learn it. Again, curiosity plays an important role here because a curious person is naturally motivated.

2. Be curious

Curiosity is essential because it makes the process of developing skills much more enjoyable. If you are curious, you will naturally want to know more simply because it’s fun. You will go further and deeper than those who develop their skills because they must.

Here are some things you can do to build curiosity:

• Don’t say that something is boring
  Saying that something is boring is killing curiosity since it closes door of possibilities.
• Make asking a habit
  Often we take things for granted and accept them as they are. Don’t. Build the habit of digging deeper below the surface. Your tool to do that is questions.
• Make things fun
  Don’t just look at the serious side of things. Look at their fun side too.

3. Be a versatilist

A versatilist is someone who can easily adapt to new situations and quickly develop the skills necessary to excel. Being a versatilist essentially means being a smart learner who knows what to learn and how to quickly learn it.

To know what to learn, a versatilist should anticipate the future. That way he will get a sense of what new skills will be in demand and prepare himself before most people do.

4. Find your mentors

While having role models is good, in many cases you can’t connect directly with them. But developing skills will be much easier if you work with those who have gone through it. That’s why you should find not just role models but also mentors. Ideally your mentors are also your role models but at least they are those who are more experienced than you. These people can teach you what to do and what not to do so that you don’t have to find them yourself the hard way. You can save a lot of time.

Finding mentors, of course, is not easy. Often you should give first before someone is willing to become your mentor. Try to be useful to them by helping them in whatever way you can. Give them a reason to invest their time in you.

5. Get feedback through real projects

The best way to develop your skills is through real projects. Why? Because real projects give you the much needed feedback to hone your skills. While many people prefer to wait until everything is well-prepared before working on real projects, you will learn faster by working on something real. You may face failures in the process but they are your stepping stones to success since they give you precious lessons.

6. Find your role models

It will be easier for you to grow if you have concrete examples of what you want to be. That’s why it’s important to find your role models. Your role models give you a standard to achieve so that you know where and how far you should go in developing your skills. It will also motivate you since you know that someone has already achieved such high standard.

7. Shorten your learning cycle

The speed of your skill development depends on the length of your learning cycle. The shorter your learning cycle, the faster you will develop your skills. Here are some ideas to shorten your learning cycle:

• Make quality effort
  I already mentioned that you should work on real projects since they give you important feedback. But having feedback alone won’t help you much. You must have quality To have it, ensure that your effort is qualityeffort. Prepare yourself as good as you can (without being over prepared) before launching an initiative. This way the feedback you get will be of higher quality.
• Measure comprehensively
  The feedback you get should also cover as many dimensions as possible. You can achieve it by measuring your performance comprehensively. The more metrics you measure, the better feedback you will get. Of course, the metrics should be chosen carefully so that you don’t waste your resources on measuring.
• Act upon the feedback
  After getting the feedback, you should act diligently upon it. Learn as much as possible from the feedback to get the most possible points for improvements. Then choose the most potential ones and do your best to improve them before launching your next initiative.

Conclusion

These tips will help you develop your skills and make your career more fulfilling. Not only will you do what matters to you, but also you will get the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve done your best.

Contributed By : Suchin Kulshrestha, Class of 2008, IBS Hyderabad

One day, I asked my friend, who has been employed with an IT firm based out of Bangalore for the last five years that what is so good about his company? He answered that it is the food! I asked, “Did I hear you say food?” and he joyfully explained that his company has catering tie up with Taj hotels and they offer all three meals buffet at subsidized rates. Apparently, this wonderful company has a huge cafeteria with a lot of options in eatables. A full time catering staff to tend you your desired coffee and assorted salads and what not! I smirked and told my friend “that explains your overtly good health!”On my way back I thought to myself – what a way to motivate your employees. You serve their palate and they would spend the entire part of the day from breakfast to dinner – working for you!

But it also made me thinking that what really makes a company so great to work for? Why it is that people would die for a job at Google or Facebook? What constitutes the X-factor in an employer?

No company is perfect and will be able to offer you everything. But there is a specific index of satisfaction and feel good emotion while going to work which is driven by work culture, employer – employee trust, management’s credibility and due consideration of each other’s needs and goals.

Our workplace is like our second home; the place other than home where we spent most of the time. Good employers understand this emotion and therefore take care of you, your career growth and aspirations, your achievements, your personal situations. They have a way of winning hearts and you feel like giving your best. So there is a mutual affair that exists between you and your employer.

As simple as it sounds, you will still find lot of your friends dissatisfied with their jobs. No doubt, human resources today have advanced a lot. Companies take efforts to keep their people happy and satisfied. But their efforts do not always show the desired results.

So let’s face it, no company can ensure job satisfaction to 100% of its employees and there will always be things to crib about. Even the ones with the most satisfying careers look forward to the weekends.

Much have been researched, written and published about the employee happiness index across the world. Out of all the reasons given by different workforce, I shortlist the following, which according to me make a workplace really happening (I would be happy to spend my life working for such organization):

• Communication: An office culture where people talk to each other, both professionally and personally with equal comfort is a winner. It gives you a sense of ease and prevents you from over stressing.

• Transparency and independence: The management treats you like grown-ups, shares information with its employees, listens to them and considers them responsible and mature enough to manage their own time and work. This gives you ample space, a sense of freedom and pride. By working at such a place you end up feeling more responsible and complete.

• Work-Life balance: It is super relaxing to have an employer who understands that their people have life outside work, which might sometime take over their time and attention. They respect and believe that offering some work-life balance will earn them commitment and loyalty from their employees.

• Fair and impartial treatment: It is a real deal to work for a company that treats you fairly, compensates you justly and rewards you without any discrimination. It gives you an opportunity of self appraisal, lets you have an insight in your work, lets you see your areas of improvement and encourages you to overcome your weaknesses. Lay-offs are a last resort and benefits are well covering your needs. Yes, such place to work is a dream for most of us. It gives you a sense of security and you can proudly say…your job has got your back!

• Work hard and play harder: They believe that fun, frolic, humor and relaxation are the allies of hard work. There is enough emphasis on extra-curricular activities and helping you explore your hobbies to keep you engaged. Every April fool’s Day, Googlers for instance are permitted to plan and implement some major gags and tricks to the world. Google is known to conduct activities, games, workshops etc to promote self learning, team building and other qualities while having fun at the same time.

• Innovation: Twitter conducts its team meeting on the roof. Meeting rooms at Google Dublin resemble a pub. Reebok converted one of their warehouses into a CrossFit workout center exclusively for their employees. Participants collectively lost over 4000 pounds during 2011. These companies promote unique and out-of-the-box ways of engaging their employees and boost productivity. Having themed office days, team photos, exotic offsite visits; these and many other ways are there that can make you love your company.

• You can stretch your brains and use your skills: It will be a dead place to work at where there are no challenges to overcome. After all, human beings are wired for that. We would love to have a job, where we figure things out, solve problems, make breakthroughs or create a difference. Nothing is more satisfying than claiming ownership of great achievement. Hence this is an exciting aspect.

• Altruistic work culture: A place of work that promotes friendship among employees over competition. Everyone takes charge and is ready to help each other in times of crisis and crunch – big designation or small – all alike. Manager takes up the task of execution if needed. There is a common goal more important than a personal one. Now that’s where you will not get hypertension or stress induced diabetes, because you have people to look up to.

So here you go! A couple of markers to make you ponder over your happiness index in your current organization and more importantly think if anybody care about that happiness index of yours. Some of us do not have a choice and we have to stick to our occupation before we find that right place for us. But for those who have it, I would say, hang on to it. Because it is easy to desire but hard to find; simple to demand, but difficult to build – a company that makes it employees call it the most exciting place to work for!

Contributed By : Isha Jajodia, Class of 2010,IBS Gurgaon

“humne baal dhoop me safed nae kiye hain!” is the phrase, almost all of us have grown up hearing from our elders. It always emphasized the fact that having more experience gives you an edge over those who have seen less of the world.

No matter at what stage of your career you currently are, if you look back, you will find yourself knowing more than what you did a year back. You grow because you constantly learn, and not just within classrooms but also outside of it. Ideally, you are valued based on your experience more than your domain knowledge.

At the budding stages of our career, most of us are all the time more concerned about getting a higher paying job instead of a better one. We are worried that if we start at a low pay scale, we will stay stuck with lesser salary, since we will be appraised on that figure. The whole idea of competing in placements revolves around who got a higher package than whom. In the rat race we forget and ignore to foresee that one of us placed with a lower CTC might eventually end up higher in the career graph than the others.

I realized this through my professional experience that at the starting of your career and sometimes even later on, money comes down in the priority list. Yes, we all are willing to work hard and deserve to be compensated for it, but you cannot put a value to the experience that you gain, to the knowledge that you earn, to the professional growth and maturity that comes with being employed.

There might be people who might disagree with this thought of mine and would refuse to compromise compensation for a better profile of work. I remember a friend of mine though, who unfortunately did not land up with a campus placement at the end of her MBA. She joined a start-up that just had four people and was paid on commission basis. There was no fixed salary that the company could provide. It was a challenging profile and difficult market conditions. But she chose to stick to the company and she told me once that the day she landed the first client for the company was the day she realized her potential, her self-worth and the value of what she has learned in the past few months. She admitted to the fact that she couldn’t have gained that level of exposure, learned to be proactive and independent, had she been a part of the target driven marketing team in a big corporation. After a year, she landed up in a team leading position with a well-known media firm, a role which she would have taken two years extra to reach, if she was hired there at beginner level.

So what added value to the same profile with which she was not able to grab a campus placement? Was that just one year of experience? That experience made her emotionally more mature. She learned the ability to handle stress situations and the potential of working with limited resources.

It is important to understand, that when a firm picks a fresher right after his/her MBA, the only way they can assess your value is through your academic credentials. It is only after some time, when you prove your worth within that firm, that you can raise your market value and be at a better bargaining position in terms of compensation. But before that, you are expected to show a positive return on what a company is investing in you.

I have seen many people, including my friends and colleagues, complaining about how their pay scale is less as compared to the industry standards. But I have always felt that to work with the best, you have to be the best. Even with fairly advanced human resources these days, companies expect you to owe them more in return than what they are paying you.

Yes, getting fairly paid is your right. But before you start feeling disheartened with your annual CTC figures, try looking at the non-material benefits that your job is offering you. You might not be at a best place right now, but in the world of corporate culture, you should learn to bring out the best of your current situation.

When I started working, I was part of a back end research support within an off shore captive unit of a global management consulting firm. The unit was just five years old and my team had 19 people. The pay scale was not at par with what my counter parts were getting. But as the unit grew, I, being a part of the smaller team, got opportunities to make bigger contributions. Within a short span of less than two years, I got a chance to visit one of the company’s consulting offices based in London and gain exposure in different areas, including training, mentoring and recruiting. I then realized the fact that even though I was paid less, the experience that I got through the various opportunities benefitted me in many unknown ways.

Initially in your career, you are in a better position to take risks, explore the domain of your interest and seek expertise in that field. Even though, your functional experience may remain the same, it may vary from industry to industry and can make a significant impact on your career in the long term. Focusing on new opportunities to learn, gaining experience in different areas and doing the work you love is relatively more important than salary. It is rather crucial to define your career objectives in the first three years of your professional life and align with the right opportunities to grow. A few thousand rupees may not turn out to be a good trade-off for the potential of growth when just starting out.

There could be four possible situations while looking for a job:

1. Good profile and good pay scale
2. Good profile but poor pay scale
3. Poor profile and good pay scale
4. Poor profile and poor pay scale

Situation (a) is very difficult to find. (c) usually does not exist, though there could be a combination of high pay but strenuous working conditions. (b) and (d) will always be there. If you are not lucky enough to land up with situation (a), then you should try grabbing an opportunity with situation (b) or (c). You will gain experience with time, with good salary without good salary even without salary. But question is what you learn from your experience. It is instrumental to give quality time to your job.

There can never be enough in any job, as you will always keep looking for more. But if you like what you do, you can always find satisfaction in it. As our elders used to say, there is no limit to learning. The same goes for experience in professional world. The more, the better; and better the experience, higher is your value in terms of money. Do not walk away from opportunities for reasons involving money or pride without considering the long term doors that you might be closing. While you are young and learning, be active and take risks to reach your goals.

Contributed By : Isha Jajodia , Class of 2010,IBS Gurgaon

Take a bow!! You proud IBSian…

You will hear these words more often than anyone else, because you are the future IBSian.

I can actually share with you as how much proud you will feel when you will pass out from the IBS.

Today IBS is not just a Business school, but it’s like a book that you will carry thru out your life…And like in a book there are many chapters, the IBS will taught you at the different stages of life.

In this article, I will share very minute and small things thru which you can easily become a core member of the IBS family and you will also learn as how the IBS family will help you in the future, if you are facing any kind of difficulties in your life…

First thing first, the Great IBS Alumni & its Vision :  To Enrich the lives of alumni by helping them establish life time relationships with not only their fellow alumni but with their alma mater. This involves encouraging meaningful involvement and leadership from all alumni to benefit the community as a whole.

The IBS Alumni Federation gives you access to a vast network of professionals and offers you endless opportunities to connect, build relationships, participate and continue to learn from the IBSAF community.

The IBS Alumni Federation is for all IBS alumni who seek personal, professional and intellectual opportunities, because your IBS advantage continues beyond graduation.

The IBS Alumni Federation is a membership organization comprising more than 35,000 alumni of IBS. Founded in 1997, the Federation has a diverse and rich history of bringing alumni together to support the Institute, its students and each other.

You can view and update your profile by visiting the IBS Alumni page.

You can search the Alumni directory and can find out all the relevant details about your Alumni’s…

Even you can search the Job Board by visiting the IBS Alumni page and search thru the latest thousands of jobs posted by the fellow IBSian.

IBS Unique way of Learning: Students at IBS have the advantage of developing a cross-functional knowledge base, with good synthesis of Indian and International perspectives.

Case based Learning: IBS always stress upon the Case based Learning, which is an important component of business education at IBS. Most of the courses are taught through real-life cases, designed to help bridge the gap between management theory and practice.

Business Modeling and Simulation: IBS includes business modeling and simulation games in its curriculum for the program, to give students an introduction to business decision making.

Strong Industry interface: IBS has a strong, active and growing interface with business and industry, with experts from a range of leading companies delivering regular guest lectures and serving as members of various advisory boards.

Student Life @ Campus : The student community at IBS is truly diverse; students come from different states, social and cultural backgrounds, and all walks of life. They become a part of the IBS community, and get an unparalleled exposure to different cultures, languages and ways of living.

Student Activities is at the core of the philosophy of management education, IBS Hyderabad believes in. Co-curricular and extra-curricular activities are very much a part of the day to day life on campus.

IBS Students at the International Sports Map :  Students also participate successfully in national and international inter-business school competitions.

Two of our MBA students were among the six finalists at the Baylor – USASBE Student Case Writing Competition held in January 2015 at Tampa, Florida, USA, while a team of four MBA students were in the top six of the Baylor-USASBE Student Case Writing Competition held in January 2014 at Fort Worth, Texas, USA.

One of our MBA students represented India in the Global Youth Marketing Camp organized by Hyundai in Seoul, South Korea in February 2013. A team of two MBA students won the Second prize in the Baylor-USASBE Student Case Competition held in South Carolina, USA in January 2011.

Our students won the Global Social entrepreneurship Competition 2007 organized by University of Washington, USA, competing against students from business schools around the world.

Social Networking of IBSian : You can also get connected with the IBSians thru the different way of the social network sites…

LinkedIn : https://in.linkedin.com/in/archyd

Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/Connections.IBSH

Twitter : https://twitter.com/ibsindia1

You can easily remain connected thru the various social, networking and own IBS sites..These choices given by the IBS to all of its students so as to stay connected with their fellow colleagues  wherever they are…

Each of the IBSian is a special and unique student for the IBS Management and the methods provided above to remain connected are just a way of showing love and care to their students…

I have one live example to quote here as how much care IBS Management does for their students…When we finish our course in Jul’2005, all the students got placed, except for those who did not wish to sit for the placements, in the month of Jan-Mar’2005. There were a bunch of HR Students who got placed but was not happy with the existing employer as the set up for some of the companies were too small to accommodate these students and after a while these students got back to the IBS Management and requested for re-placements for them…as far as I think, these were the days of Jun’2005.

After hearing the story from the students, the management decided to re-start the placements for all those students and the Placement cell was asked to re-approach the companies for the placements…we were actually shocked to see the kind of help that was extended by the IBS management at that point of time to all those students who were not happy with their existing employers..

Eventually, the hard work of the Management paid off in just 2 months and all the students were got placed in some of the big companies and some students were even placed at the MNCs…one of my best friend was also in that group and today he is at Senior Position at Deloitte India and working for last 10 years now…

So as I mentioned earlier that IBS is not just a business school, it is like a book which will be with you forever for your life and each chapter of that book will give you strength and power to conquer the world!!

I am proud to be an IBSian!!

Contributed By : Himanshu Chaudhary, Class of 2003-05, IBS Hyderabad

Ways and Means to Undergo the Credibility Check

Demand for quality and employable MBA pass-outs are increasing every year and this has given rise to considerable number of institutions offering MBAs with different value-propositions (dual degree programme, student exchange programme, etc) titled differently (MBA, PGDM, PGDBM, etc). Hence prospective students and professionals aspiring to take up MBA have a variety of options to choose from and they search for benchmarks and guidance across the web and offline to make their investment and time of study worthy enough. One of such valuable aid is the B-school rankings that are published every year by different credible media institutions as a research result of great minds. Even though such B-school rankings published aid the prospects a lot in deciding, the two things most of the prospects misses out while going through the rankings are,

a) Not knowing the factors and their corresponding weights for the selection and ranking of a particular B-school and

b) The distance between the two consecutive ranks eg: The scores earned by 7^th ranking B-school and 8^th ranking B-school may be 400/500 and 220/500 which actually makes a huge difference. We may think that won’t the institutions undertaking ranking process would have been wise enough to do it in the best possible way, but each and every research has its own drawback and as ranking system is easily understood by mass audience they are also left with no choice. Hence we as prospects also has the responsibility to go to the bottom of it and select the apt B-school to make our time and investment worthy.

              The two points mentioned above may look trivial for a prospect who seeks only for a good placement after MBA but it makes a lot difference for the prospects who dream to build something of their own or for those who are very much passionate about bringing a difference as a professional in their future job. Hence considering the media rankings alone is not the right way for selecting a B-school in addition to that we need a little tapping work to do.  But please note here we does not ask you to make a research but just recommend you to travel some extra mile by putting simplest and smallest efforts that can obtain quality and credible information which are easily available with a tap of your finger for…. somewhat a planned destiny!

All that you need to have to travel this extra mile are,

i)  A Smart Phone or a Computer connected with internet, your Linked In and Facebook IDs

ii)  Interested specializations (keep it as less as 3) in MBA (eg. Finance, Tourism, Human Resources, etc) even though you will specialize in 1 or 2 it is too early to say which are those before you take up the course, so have few specializations in your mind

iii) Have a list of B-schools that you wish to join

Once you have these then we are Good- To- Go! the down listed are the few credible ways that helps you in finding necessary information to zero-in an apt B-school.

Online- Socialize:

i) LinkedIn:

Connect to the Linked in page of B-schools you have shortlisted, it will offer you credible alumni connections who are professionals at different geographies and lines of business. Their details can be obtained by viewing their profiles in the view profile page.

ii) Facebook:

As every other place Facebook can help you wonderfully. Find the alumni page of the institutes you have shortlisted

           Once you do (i) and (ii), select few of the members in the page and send them a message about your willingness to join the B-school from where they passed-out and request them for some help in this regard. Many would surely reply and thereby you can ask them the below questions pertaining to,

• Job opportunities
• Career growth
• Learning culture
• Faculty standard
• Business incubation/ Entrepreneurship cells, etc.

            These are the right people to consult about the afterlife of MBA and opinions about their B-Schools because they would be mature and neutral enough to comment/ guide as they have already crossed the path you dream to travel.

            With the above information we have the details about their post MBA status and their opinions about the B-school but the opinions are the result of the experience they had then, which may be not true now, so to understand the present scenario we go further.

iii) Find the B-school Facebook pages of the present batch and post your questions pertaining to,

• On-campus placements
• Learning culture
• Faculty standard
• Career opportunities & Average package or your field of your interest, etc

            One other advantage of querying the present batch is that you can get information relating to accommodation, food, etc that are in existence and ultimately there are high chances of you having couple of friends in the institution which you may finalize to join

iv) Join the official B-School Facebook page to get updated with the guest lectures, workshops, seminars, conferences, events, etc. and if a B-school regularly organizes such events then it’s a very happening place and it means that it provides you a quality platform to express, learn, perform and nurture different skills necessary

Website:

             Checking the websites of B-schools cannot be termed as the best way to know about the present as only few update it regularly but it is a good means to know the details of the recent past. Here the information like,

1. Batch composition of students from different academic & professional backgrounds
2. Faculty profiles (their Alma mater, academic, professional and research experiences) & information about their work type like Full Time/ Part Time/ Guest Lecture/ Visiting Professor
3. Past and present researches undertaken, MOUs or Tie-ups with renowned research and educational institutions and its benefits for the students
4. Library infrastructure comprising online and offline resources for study and other essential infrastructure
5. Annual business conclaves, cultural events, seminars, etc. are invaluable and credible to consider

Offline- Communication Centers:

            Most B- Schools have their Marketing/ Sales/ Admission Offices across different cities, so your  nearest office address can be obtained from their websites, and you should visit them to know in detail about their offerings but never buy the generalized statements from them outright like, 100% placements, abroad opportunities, educational loan assistance, etc try asking them the details because there is no point in you getting placed in odd jobs just because the proper job roles were not offered for you in a B-school, so by offering some job to the students still a B-school can proclaim the statement ‘100% placement guaranteed’ hence beware.

              Kindly note that any information obtained from the above sources can be verified with the help of the B-school’s present batch Facebook page.

So my dear friends try to undergo the credibility check by,

• Connecting to Linked In and Querying the Facebook Alumni page
• Joining and Querying the Facebook page of B-schools’ present batch
• Surf through the B-schools websites
• Collect the details from the communication centers of the B-schools nearby
• Any details obtained can be cross verified through the members of the B-schools’ present batch Facebook page

            Once again the above recommended ways and means does not generalizes or advocates that this is the right way of undergoing the credibility check, all it suggests is that this is one of the ways of undertaking it and it is sure to increase the accuracy of your decision making process. Hence travel this extra mile now so that there is no need for you to travel long miles for your apt career post-MBA.

Contributed By : L.Gowtham, Class of 2013, IBS Hyderabad