You need to make yourself employable in order to join this knowledge-intensive economy.Thus, skill development must start early, while you are pursuing your academic education.
India has enormous economic potential which means that our youth have tremendous career opportunities. The economy is progressing at a robust growth rate?the second-highest globally. The world acknowledges that the principal reason behind India?s economic progress is our vibrant young workforce, the largest in the world. However, there is an unprecedented problem in our knowledge economy?sizeable number of youth are unemployed because they are unemployable.
Former President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam, recently said in an address to college students, ?As we have entered into a trillion-dollar economy and continue to be in the ascending economic trajectory, we are concerned about the rising unemployment. It is not unemployment which is a problem; it is unemployment due to unemployability which is a major challenge.? According to the Nasscom-McKinsey report, the Indian industry is facing its biggest human resources shortage ever. As of 2011, there was a shortage of 3.1 million knowledge workers across industries. The situation is rectifiable though. Here, I will give you some pointers that might be useful for you if you are a college student?things that I feel somebody had told me when I was in college.
When you finish college, you are proficient in academic skills. However, as we all know, working in the corporate world is a different ball game. While academic skills definitely count, various other skills such as communication skills, presentation skills, interpersonal and team skills among others, play a critical role in shaping your career and help in your advancement in the corporate world. Lack of these basic skills may hamper your career prospects even if you have a college degree. In fact, you may not be able to get a job offer in the first place and may get rejected at the interview stage itself. You need to make yourself employable in order to join this knowledge-intensive economy. Therefore, skill development must start early, even while you are pursuing your academic education.
Acquiring these skills is not monetarily costly?the only requirement is some positive intent and hard work. To begin with, talk to some successful professionals whom you look up to and seek their guidance. Enquire about how they acquired these skills themselves. For instance, the way I learnt interview skills was by doing mock interviews with myself before any interview. I was too shy to ask somebody to do a mock interview for me. So I would draw a list of tentative questions that may be asked and would pose them to myself in an interview format sitting in front of a mirror. It was difficult initially because I would break into a laughter looking at the mirror talking to myself. However, when I persevered with it, I learnt a lot about interview facing skills which no training academy or B-school could have taught me. Like, for instance, I learnt how to answer a question in a structured way, how to make a long conversation interesting, how to coordinate my hand movements and body language while speaking to enhance what I was saying and to look confident even if I was nervous inside. They have helped me professionally in a lot of ways that I couldn?t have imagined, and the hard work has been worth it. So you can learn these soft-skills yourself with a bit of hard work and the right guidance. Of course, experience may teach you all this. But the industry today needs professionals who hit the ground running and seeks well-rounded personalities to begin with. Acquiring these skills is like investing in yourself which would provide you ample returns in whichever industry you join.
Apart from these generic skills, there are domain-specific skills in each industry. For instance, if you are an aspiring IT professional, you can increase your employability by being proficient in the latest platforms and programming language which would enhance your job prospects. Even if you are currently employed, it is advisable to keep upgrading your skill-set with the latest advancements in your specific field so that you become better and better. To know about these domain-specific skills, you need to interact with industry professionals who are well-informed and knowledgeable. The best way is to talk to your seniors from college or other senior industry professionals and seek their guidance. This you need to do even while you are pursuing your academic education so that you have ample time to groom yourself for the desired job profile.
In case you have already finished your education and are unemployed, or are not too happy with your current job, there are a lot of other alternate career choices today. You might start your own business! It is not very difficult. I am a new-age entrepreneur myself and I am saying this from experience. To cite an example, my juniors from IIT, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, started Flipkart in 2007. Both come from a middle-class family and were bored with their jobs in amazon.com. They started with a small capital and today the firm is doing revenues worth R500 crore and is fast becoming a household name. Starting a business does not require huge amount of capital, as is normally believed. The ingredients you need to start a business are a good idea, domain-specific knowledge to implement it well, the right attitude, and a strong will as there may be some initial setbacks. If you think you are under-prepared, you can coach yourself, while you bide your time. Say, for instance, you are not sure that you have the requisite domain expertise to start on your own. Instead of getting discouraged or even trying to do an MBA to learn those skills, an option might be to get trained under a small organisation and learn first-hand business intricacies. Even if you do an internship under an effective businessman, you can learn the nitty-gritties of running the business. Moreover, unlike in an MBA where you may learn mostly theory and may equip yourself academically, this experience will train you practically and will stand in good stead in future.
Think of the work as a learning experience and as an investment in yourself. It will be in your interest to not have high salary expectations. If they pay you well, fine, but don?t get disheartened and squander the learning opportunity only because the salary isn?t good enough. Normally, at the entry level, salaries are not high as you may not able to contribute in a profitable way to the business while you are learning. In fact, focusing on the salary in the initial years is sub-optimal. Most of my friends who did not bother about money initially are the once who are earning the most now. The emphasis should be on the learning potential, on improving your skillset, and on assimilating the best practices in business. Think of the assignment as a launch pad?as a practical education opportunity and not just a job. Learn as much as you can. This learning will be a lifetime asset for you.
The generation before us did not have the kind of opportunities that today?s youth have. Even graduates and post-graduates found it difficult to find employment in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, even a college drop-out can find a job in a BPO. This has been made possible by the deregulation of our economy in the early 1990s by the then finance minister Manmohan Singh, whose results we are enjoying now. Let?s not underutilise this opportunity by being under-prepared. Let?s invest in our own future and equip ourselves to grab the opportunities available with both hands. It is an investment worth making that will produce lifetime returns for each one of us.
The author is a BTech from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. He was an Investment Banker with JPMorgan Bank in Hong Kong, New York and Singapore. He is currently CEO, Quantum Phinance. He also teaches as a visiting faculty at IIM Calcutta
