Campus to Corporate: Are you ready for the change

organisation?

Publisher’s Note

Making the transition from College/ University Campus to Corporate World is one of the biggest challenges students face in their career as they confront an inevitable transition from the happy assignments and mid-semesters scenario to team work and deadlines. Moving from an academic environment to a corporate setting has many changes and one needs to understand the organisational dynamics in order to get well in this new environment as corporate houses prefer to recruit employees who can be immediately employed and deployed. Training college/ university students to make them more employable is one of the key challenges for most of the companies across the world. So it is evident that companies also feel the necessity to groom the fresh students to make them more professional and fitted to a corporate setup and that is why companies organise various workshops to groom their employees. However, in most of the cases it is seen that these workshops end in incomplete training and disappointment.

Students and youngsters find it difficult to adapt the requirements of corporate environment primarily because of the vast difference in the way professors and managers operate; while professors focus on increasing learning quotient and improving subject matter understanding, managers want implementation of the knowledge and therefore focus on getting the task done, meeting deadlines, etc. So, while one focuses on learning, the other focuses on significant leverage. This added pressure takes a heavy toll on students and makes it even more difficult for them to scale the success ladder at corporate level. Besides handling these pressures, it is becoming more and more important to have the correct know-how to proceed in career.

To bridge the gap that exists between Campus environment and Corporate setting and to help those students who are just entering the Corporate World or in the threshold of Campus and Corporate, V&S Publishers has launched its imprint – Campus to Corporate.

This book has been written to make the young trainees aware of the changes that they should expect on the eventful transition from campus to corporate and hence help them set realistic expectations from work life. We hope this book will help readers not only prepare for the recruitment process but also cope with the challenges they face in work life and helps fresh graduates become better employees and professionals.

Acknowledgements

It is difficult to succeed in an endeavour without help and support from significant others. This book would not have been possible without the interest in books that my Father, Sh. Onkar Dutt Sharma, gave me in legacy and the numerous selfless sacrifices by my Mother, Smt. Nirmala Sharma.

I thank my wife Ritu for the constant inspiration and motivation through the ups and downs in my career and my little daughter Ananya and nephew Aditya for their smiles and affection which keep me energised and full of life. My book would be incomplete without referring the names of my siblings – Priyanka and Tarun, in whose loving company I grew up.

I have been fortunate to have worked with Mr. L Ravichandran, my first Manager. I thank him for guiding me so well through the first two years of my career. I also can’t thank enough Mr. Andleeb Jain, my friend, philosopher and guide, who has influenced my life in more than one way. I am forever indebted to him for all his kindness.

Learning can’t happen without a Guru and I am lucky to have got at least two. I thank Dr.S Swaminathan for numerous little and big things that I learnt from him and also for igniting my passion in the field of Human Resources. I thank Mr. PM Kumar, who has been a constant source of inspiration for me. Listening to him speak for a minute is worth a thousand such books.

In the end I thank all Colleges and Institutes including my Alma Mater Delhi College of Engineering for continuously producing some of the best Engineers and Managers in the world despite the challenges that a developing nation like India faces.

Preface

Recently, I read a news article in a national daily: Management Trainees Quit a Leading Public Sector Unit. This organisation wanted to rejuvenate itself by bringing in these young people from leading premier institutes as change-agents. However, when the trainees went there, they found to their surprise that the treatment given to them was not what they had expected. As an outcome of resulting frustration they decided to quit. One can’t single out who was responsible for it. The students joining the organisation were as much at fault for having unrealistic expectations as the organisation was for not setting expectations right. This is an example of what usually happens with Management and Engineer trainees: Unmet expectations resulting in frustrations. Most of them, therefore, usually leave their first company within a year or two.

From being a Management trainee myself to handling Management and Engineer trainees, I have been for the last ten years exposed to the challenges faced by them both in securing a job that suits their personality, skills and aspirations, and then in adapting themselves to the change they encounter when they join their first job. So, when my publisher contacted me early this year for writing a book on this subject, it was a very easy and eager Yes from me. I thought it a really good opportunity for me to reach students and fresh Management and Engineer trainees and share certain facts and techniques with them to cope better with this transition; and, hence this book in your hands today. This book has been written to make the young trainees aware of the changes that they should expect and hence help them set realistic expectations from work life.

As I interacted with different institutes and colleges as part of my job, I realised that they are now much more sensitised to the challenges of campus-to-corporate transition than what they were a decade ago. Despite the commendable efforts of those institutes, I still find students lacking in their adaptive skills when they come to work. I found less was being done to address this adaptive challenge. Though, I am dealing with both pre-placement and post-placement scenarios in this book, it is the second part which differentiates this book from most others.

I hope this book helps fresh graduates become better employees and professionals and helps the Indian Economy keep growing at an ever-increasing pace.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other peoples thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important: Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

— Steve Jobs

Introduction

The Job of Getting a Job

The profession a person practices has a big say in definition of his overall personality. I have often noticed (and, I am sure you would also have) that while meeting new people, one among a first few questions is – What do you do? Or, where do you work? In fact we fall victim to this obsessive question immediately after coming to this mortal planet. Parents usually insist the priests and astrologers to predict what would the child do when he grows up. This curiosity doesn’t die down so easily. Parents keep asking the child again and again – What do you want to do when you grow up? Each comment from the teacher is taken with an intention to predict which particular area a child excels in. Each exam a child writes becomes an assessment for how good the child would be in getting a job. And, each activity of the child is observed for some hidden talent.

In India students often take a decision to pursue a particular career by the time they write their class 10th exam. There is a pretty big industry out there helping students prepare for various competitive examinations. Few of these aspirants get into coveted institutes and are assured of being placed in plush paying jobs and others get into not-so-premier institutes and prepare hard to enter the competitive job market. Whatever the route be, we invest close to 30% of our lives just preparing to be into a profession and thus it is no surprise that it plays such a big part in defining our personality. Moreover, what we do in a few years before getting a job and for a next few years after getting the job is massively instrumental in deciding how we spend the rest of our lives.

India’s higher education system is third largest in the world with more than 316 Central and State Universities, 129 Deemed Universities and 90 Private Universities¹. There are more than 16000 colleges and institutes in which are enrolled more than 80 thousand students. Interestingly, most of the corporates are unanimously of the view that a very scant percentage of this population is really employable. In an international study conducted by McKinsey in 2008, it was reported that only 25% of Engineers, 15% of Finance/ Accounting professionals, and 10% of other general candidates are suitable for jobs that Indian Companies have to offer². The 11th five year plan noted that in institutes providing vocational and technical education the quality of training provided was a concern³. The primary purpose of our institutes, universities, colleges is to impart academic knowledge and most of them are not able to even do that properly before they could prepare the students for handling the real life problems at the workplace.

Missing the point

Primed by the way our educational institutes approach education, the preparation that we put in to get that dream job and to be successful in it is focused singularly on academics. Academics only define one part of any job – ‘What. The other important part –’How to’ – is often left to experience – a tough and slow teacher. In fact the content or the what part, coupled with general preparation for Group Discussions (GD) and Interviews, helps us to get the job; and, perhaps, that is why getting a job is often an easier part. The difficult part is to sustain and progress in the job once you get it. Any performance at the work-place is delivered on the contextual background of human systems. The How to part thus refers to the way a person navigates through this system to deliver the performance. It includes working in a team, understanding needs of others, communicating effectively with others, understanding culture, making decisions in ambiguous situations, managing emotions, managing relationships, etc. These skills are learnt by the part of the brain entrenched deep down. It learns only in the presence of commitment, concerted practice, and constant feedback⁴. Once on the job people often take time to come up to the learning curve and start performing.

Further, if the focus is too much on getting a job, the long term goal of career development might be jeopardised. There is a definite difference between getting a job and making a career. Job is a snap-shot but career is a live motion film. I define career to have five irreducible components:

It should help you discover and develop an identity

It should ignite passion in you

It should contribute value to the society

It should provide you a decent living

It should make you feel successful

In my opinion a career that lacks any of these is employment and not career in the real sense.

Human beings differ from other organisms, so far science believes, in being able to remember the past and visualise the future. Most other organisms stay perpetually locked in the present. This capability is no small gift to mankind. It is because of this capability that we can imagine the results of our decisions in distant future. However, despite this wonderful gift many of us don’t utilise it while taking the job related decisions and end up in leading suboptimal lives.

Two phases in the journey

Before starting this book I went through a few books that have been written earlier on the subject and I found that a lot of emphasis there is put on the first half of the journey – getting the job and the second part – on the job – is given a secondary treatment. I don’t undermine the effort that those books put for providing useful tips for preparing getting into the world of work. The tips and techniques offered are quite useful and can really help an aspirant get a good job. However, I feel that this is the same cardinal mistake that our academic institutes are guilty of: Not preparing the students for the How to part of the job.

Table 1.1

The geneses of emotions that a job-seeker goes through and that a newcomer faces are very different. While one prepares for getting a job, the emotions have genesis in aspirations but while in the job the genesis of emotions is in situations one is face-to-face with. The emotions – anxiety, apprehension, depression, stress – while preparing for the job are because of self-assessment of adequacy of academic and interview process skills. In the job, however, same emotions – anxiety, apprehension, depression, stress – are because of adaptability issues. The adaptability skills thus require a special treatment in a book that claims to be the succor of a fresher.

Keeping this view in mind I have divided the book in two parts, which have a logical sequence but emotional disconnect. The former deals with aspirations and emotions associated with it, while the latter deals with emotions that one encounters when one is face-to-face with the reality quite different from expectations.

Book’s Intention

Mullah Nasiruddin was returning home from his work one night. He saw a man bent over his knees and searching frantically for something below the street lamp. A good Samaritan that he was, Mullah Nasiruddin went to the hapless looking guy and asked him, What are your searching for, Brother? My keys, he replied. Oh! I see. Let me also help you then. Mullah also joined him in his search. After searching desperately for 10 minutes Mullah gave up. He asked him again, Where the hell did you drop it? There below that tree, he pointed to a tree 100 meters from the street lamp. Why the heck are you searching here then? Because light is here only; it’s dark over there," he replied innocently.

Though the idiocy of the desperate key searcher is very obvious in this example, humans have a dismal record of focusing only on available information (below the lamp) and totally disregarding the information that is not in front of eyes (in darkness, below the tree). Absence doesn’t draw our attention⁵. It is called Omission Bias. Learning thus takes place in four steps:

Unconscious Incompetence: I don’t know that I am bad at adapting to change (because I have never faced change)

Conscious Incompetence: I know that I am bad at adapting to change (because I have to live in hostel without the comforts of home)

Conscious competence: I practice the new skills consciously (I try consciously to become more accommodating with other students)

Unconscious competence: Because of continuous practice I demonstrate these skills without conscious effort (When I get a job, I am naturally accommodating to other colleagues)

Students often do not know what they lack (absence of knowledge) so they are not able to take effective decisions in choosing a career or prepare effectively for either the campus placements or the challenges of first job. They follow whatever is visible to them –peers, relatives, recruitment trends, popular choices, etc. This type of preparation might or might not lead a person to a desirable goal.