Growth along the personality curve

Upasana Pande

There was a time when an MBA degree was a guarantor of career success. It simply did not matter what kind of nerd you were. But times are changing and today, not just a degree, but your presentation and personality skills also make a difference to how fast you climb up the career ladder.

An independent study conducted on CEOs, by Stanford Research Institute and Carnegie Mellon in the US, found that long-term job success depends 75 per cent on peoples’ skills and only 25 per cent on technical knowledge. Another study done by Harvard University found even more startling results—85 per cent of jobs and promotions happened because of the candidate’s attitude and only 15 per cent because of the facts and figures he packed under his belt. Obviously, soft skills sell hard skills.

Personalitree, an e-learning company, is taking advantage of this fact and offering interactive training resources to help executives learn the soft skills that could take them places. The company purports to be the first of its kind in India, offering as it does online training programmes that can substitute or supplement live training. It offers a number of workshops on a variety of subjects, developed by some of the finest trainers in India and abroad, who have extensive experience in conducting workshops.

Says Ms Simran Bhargava, chief of content, Personalitree, “India produces technically and academically brilliant students, but they are lacking in soft skills. Through our e-learning courses, people will become self-motivated, leading to the overall betterment of the organisation to which they belong. Personalitree offers courses on speaking skills, writing skills, management skills, leadership skills, creative thinking, interpersonal skills, personal development skills, success skills, all of which will help to enhance the job worthiness of the person.”

Ms Bhargava explains that the workshops allow the student to take his own time and pace in going through the course modules, revisiting them if he feels the need. Multimedia is used extensively to enhance the learning process through interactive quizzes, role-playing and similar exercises. Personalitree utilises what it calls the ‘4 M’ approach to conduct workshops—measure, monitor, manage and maximise.

Personalitree’s courses are targeted mainly at university students and corporate executives. The workshops are priced according to the time and validity of the modules. Ms Bhargava says: “The retail price per course is about Rs 400 for 4-5 hours of online training. This is very cost effective when compared to similar two-day live workshops, which cost about Rs 5,000-7,000.”

It is possible for a company to train all its employees using the Personalitree training courses, even if they are based in places as diverse as Jaipur and Jabalpur. Since all the learning is done through the Net, all the company needs is a telephone line and an Internet connection.

Large organisations today are constantly in search of good trainers. One of Personalitree’s greatest strengths is that it has on board some of the best trainers in the world. These include well-known names such as Shiv Khera, Bhaskar Pant, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Dr S Sreenivas Rao, Sabira Merchant, Dr S K Chakraborty, Jeff Davidson, Susan Roane and Art Cornwell.

Personalitree’s courses can also be used to supplement live training that may already be on as part of a workshop, say its initiators.

A virtual advisor is available 24 hours a day. Nicknamed ‘Tia’, students can e-mail her with any questions pertaining to the workshops. Personalitree also organises live training workshops once in a while for those who feel the need of an actual teacher. The Personality Assessment Centre tests each candidate’s personality, aptitude, emotional quotient and other related qualities. This also identifies his strengths and weaknesses and enables him to build on the negative and advance the positive traits.

Says Ms Bhargava: “We identified the top skills that would enhance a person’s job worthiness and then created a programme encompassing all of them. Then we went looking for the best minds who were already delivering such workshops and this was where the twist was, because there were not so many. We identified the best talent and brought them onto one common platform.”

Is this the first time such a programme is being offered? “In this manner, yes,” says Prasoon Parijat, head of Training Programs, Personalitree. “While we cannot deny the fact that some segmented programs do exist, it is being done by one-bucket shops and not in any organised manner.”

Are the courses really useful? “We went to top campuses around the country—BITS Pilani, IIMs and XLRI—and told the students there about our courses. We targeted those who had just passed out and were on their way to joining corporates. When people became aware of our courses, they rated them very highly, giving 8 out of 10 and even 11 out of 10, but we put all of this aside and, working on the feedback we received, incorporated an additional layer in our modules,” says Mr Parijat.

He reveals with pride, “Citibank and American Express have already signed up for our courses, and many more companies are planning to do so.”