JOB READINESS
By: Gurram Bhaskar
Tags: Job Preparation, Students, Jobs, Job Search, Job Interview

JOB READINESS

Students need to focus on six areas during their education to ensure that they are trained well to become professionals

Industry-Academia gap is probably the most clichéd term heard during campus placements. As campus recruits cannot be directly deployed in projects, rigorous training for them is a prime area of concern for many organizations. This entails a heavy investment of time and money and often becomes a reason to avoid campus hires.

Therefore, it is important for students to be job ready from Day 1. They should look upon college education as a medium of overall personality growth and not just facilitator of degree. There are a lot of focus areas for students during college education, which can help them in their professional beginning.

Technical Skills: Students should work towards honing their technical capabilities through all possible learning channels. They should be always in synchronization with the market demand and updated with the latest technology and skills.

Domain Knowledge: Having domain knowledge or at least the know-how of various industries can help students to adapt to the corporate lingo pretty quickly. This will also help them in understanding the practical usage of the code or module they would be working on.

Soft Skills: Working in teams and doing group assignments can help students learn a lot about team management and dynamics. Group assignments help students appreciate the challenges faced by a team and prepare them for working as a unit.

Time Management: Each student should have a habit of multitasking. Managing tasks and assigning priority is a crucial requirement for a job.

Networking: Getting to know peers and teachers is equally important. Students should learn to build relationships right from college and also mentor their juniors.

Live Projects: Try and get hands on experience by getting involved in live projects and if possible, doing internship in relevant areas. This will help the students in understanding the functioning of various departments in an organization and also make them comfortable while facing a client.

In addition to this, employers should also ensure that students get required exposure to the corporate culture before joining. With the emergence of digital and social platforms, employers now have the opportunity of multiple interactions with students which can be used for educating students about the organization.

Preparatory sessions: With the use of digital and web-based modules, students can be educated about the organization and the domains they will be working on. Interactive sessions can be designed to teach the various technical skills and students can be assigned small projects to work on.

Online engagement: With daily quizzes, facts and list of dos/donts, employers can educate the students about the company. They can also use this forum to answer their queries and solve their doubts.

College to Corporate training: Tailor-made learning programmes for students to help them cope with the transition and prepare them for domain-specific alignment. Senior leaders could be invited to speak to students and share their stories.

Mentorship: Assigning a mentor right from the time of extending the offer and encouraging students to reach out to their mentor for any help.

The outcome expected out of these activities is to make the students professional and acceptable to the business and clients right from day one of their on-boarding. These practices will not just help the employer, but also the industry in producing better professionals

Recent Trends And Changes

In recent years, companies across the globe have experienced an unprecedented change. Significant forces such as globalization, technological advancements, growth of gig work and demographic trends have dramatically affected the composition of the workforce, resulted in the emergence of new business models, rise in demand for new competencies and redefined existing jobs. The rise of start-ups and technology have created many new industries and made several jobs obsolete. Companies face significant unpredictability as they venture to prepare for the workplace of the future which has affected both employers and employees around the world. Colleges cannot keep up with these trends and are unable to update their curriculum in time for corporate demands.

According to a 2018 report of World Economic Forum, the growth of new technologies like machines and algorithms is expected to create 58 million new jobs and displace 75 million existing jobs by 2022–133 million new jobs in total.

New technologies are increasingly being introduced in the workplace such as automation, machine learning, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Hence, a general increase in the skills, technical knowledge, and formal education of the workforce is required as there is a rising difficulty of finding and recruiting workers with the skills for rapidly evolving jobs.

A Harvard Business School report provides insights into the attitudes of business leaders and workers in India along with unique challenges the country faces. According to the report, business leaders in India were the most likely to report that they were experiencing the effects of automation. The report also highlights the obstacles that workers perceive are preventing them from acting today including unaffordable immediate costs, no time to invest and insufficient employer support.

Potential Solutions And Actions To Be Taken

In India, our academic curriculum needs to be tuned to match industry needs. In addition, project-based learning and internships is more important than ever. This allows for students to get practical exposure and learn on the job, even if their text books cannot get them work-ready.

If there is a joint effort focused on learning, right from the academicians to companies and the government, we can undoubtedly bridge the skill gap. This requires industry recognized colleges, paid internships and apprenticeship opportunities offered by companies, industry leaders and mentors embedded into the system right from the school years.

Concluding Thoughts

Millennials in India (18–35 years) contribute nearly one half (47 per cent) of the country’s working population. As they are likely to continue to remain the largest chunk of the country’s workforce for the next ten years, this is an opportunity as well the need of the hour to make them employable.

According to a recent study by the Global Business Coalition for Education, United Nations Children’s Fund and the Education Commission, more than 50 per cent of Indian youth is not on track to have the education and skills necessary for employment by 2030.

Instead of waiting around for someone to train you or hire you, the youth should take up the challenge of getting work-ready and finding their own career path. They should develop their soft skills, hard skills and focus on garnering as much corporate exposure as possible through internships, jobs and mentorship opportunities.

CREATE NICE RESUME

So you’re about to apply for a job and you’ve been asked to present your resume or as others might call it, a CV.

How do you ensure that your resume stands out from the crowd? After all, there are probably dozens, if not, hundreds of other applicants going for the same coveted role.

Here are some tips which you might find useful to bear in mind when constructing your CV.

1. Less is more

So many applicants make the fatal mistake of over-crowding their CV with too much information. Try to remember that your employer’s time is precious, and they are unlikely to want to spend more than a couple of minutes on each application. Try to keep your resume ideally to under 2 pages. No one wants to plough through 4 or 5 pages of information. If you’ve had multiple jobs in the past, focus on your last 3 roles and provide a little bit more detail about those.

2. Key roles and achievements

For your last 3 roles, start off by listing the start and end dates, your job title, the organisation’s name and include a short run-down of your duties, preferably in 1 or 2 short sentences. Then include 3- 4 bullet points outlining your key achievements in that role. Many employers LOVE metrics, so where possible, try to quantify how your stint contributed to the organisation’s performance. For example, an idea you came up with delivered 25% less wastage in the first 6 months, or a team your led increased customer satisfaction by 15%. Be mindful of using sensitive information from your previous employer. For this reason, percentages work well in painting a picture without revealing too much.

3. Other roles and interests

For other roles that go beyond your last 3, do the same as for your key roles but limit the description of the role and achievements to 1 or 2 bullet points. This can be challenging, but it does force you to consider what REALLY matters. If there is only one thing you could say about the role, what would it be? Does it grab the reader’s attention and make them want to find out more during the interview?

4. References

Building a resume is more than just an exercise you do on your computer. Career-oriented individuals understand that every job they do CONTRIBUTES to the building of a robust and interesting resume. In other words, you are ALWAYS building a resume. For this reason, it is important that you make a great impression on your bosses and co-workers as you could be calling on them to provide a reference in the future. References can make or break an application, so you want to ensure that you have great relationships with your potential referees. Also remember to ask the referee for permission before including their name in your CV. There is nothing more embarrassing than a referee telling a prospective employer that they barely remember you, or worse yet, tell your prospective employer things that fail to match expectations set in your application.

5. What if I have very little experience, e.g. still in school?

It’s okay if you haven’t worked before. Include details of your academic achievements as well as your participation in school teams, clubs and organisations. While being good at school helps, employers also want to get a sense of your attitude and aptitude for work. Anything you can include to demonstrate leadership, organisational skills, initiative and drive will help.

6. Design, design, design

It’s amazing how many people overlook this in building a CV. Keep your design clean, easy on the eye and professional. Unless you are applying for a job at Disneyland, I would probably steer clear of fancy fonts in lilac. There are plenty of resume templates available on the internet, so it’s almost impossible not to find a design and layout that works well for the role you are applying for.

“ SUCCESS IS WHERE PREPARATION AND OPPORTUNITY MEET”

Good luck!

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