CAMPUS to CORPORATE: Move from a CALLOW to CHARISMATIC Professional - A JARVIS example

The Only Source of Knowledge is Experience - Albert Einstein

Prologue

I wanted to write an article that I felt may resonate well with most of my followers. I get asked for advice every now and then on how one can shape up their career from campus to corporate. Whilst I am not an expert in this field by any means, following are some of the thoughts I felt will be useful. I have included some brilliant graduation speeches that will motivate one to excel, towards the end of this post. One of the nice thoughts I heard in my career is "Feedback/opinions are like gifts. One can use them, pass them to someone else or ignore them". Based on the relevance of the opinions one can decide what's relevant for them. My path has been an exciting roller coaster and I consider myself a flower that blossomed in a wild forest instead of a pleasant and beautiful flower in a brilliant garden taken care by expert gardeners. 

 Callow to Charismatic

 My key advice to the young and upcoming leaders of the future are:

• Technical brilliance is always good but it wouldn't take you to the peak. The IT industry is thriving largely on this. The more knowledgeable you are, most sought after you will become.
• Remember: What got you here will not get where you want to go. You need to redesign your thinking, need to develop an attitude of gratitude in addition to aptitude. Gratitude for the experiences you will get, challenges and excitement one would get and a gratitude for the journey of excellence one will embark upon
• One also needs to focus on excellence, which is a transformation of oneself. To be successful in career and life, one should not have an attitude that allows them to "look upon something good or look down on something bad" as it exaggerates the reality and makes one a biased person. The best thing is to look at things the way they are. A lens that allows one to focus as such will be a key tool to have.
• Build a very good mentor network - This could be personal mentor (From Familial - Your father/mother, siblings, cousins, friends, From a Social/Community Sphere - It could be Proven experts or Gurus you highly regard, or in Work sphere - a coach, mentor or a counselor who can provide very positive and constructive feedback to shape your journey to excellence. Make sure the mentor you choose is easily approachable, motivate to inspire you and a confidence builder - like a coach. This is one area where I had struggles due to one of the three areas highlighted becoming a challenge at times.

Given my personal experience of interviewing a few hundred candidates from my campus visits, First things first - what do companies look for in a candidate they recruit from campus?

• Knowledge and Experience: Does the candidate have the necessary skills and knowledge - this is done via evaluation of projects and research done by the candidate
• Is the candidate a fit for the position being interviewed: The skills may be different for different departments and soft-skill evaluation plays a role here for certain job types (such as sales and marketing)
• Is the candidate enterprising and a team player for the role/firm? Introversion vs. extroversion and ability to get along well could be a key.
• Communication and Leadership Style: This could be really a key differentiator and could score a lot more over the technical aspects.While it could be considered too early for assessing leadership style, it can be evaluated easily based on enthusiasm and energy, body language and interaction with others as it is a very easy embodiment.
• Track record for consistency: This will highlight sustained performance and agility to succeed in a competitive environment

 Soft-Skill Enhancement

If possible and affordable, join an etiquette/image building course and hone up skills in this important area. This is a skill that's gained over a period of time by seeing, following, behaving and learning. Whilst it can't be changed overnight, regular practice and good experiences will help hone one's capability here. As an example, one can improve stage speaking skills and leadership, the body language of oneself by becoming a part of Toastmasters International (www.toastmasters.org). I've seen a lot of youngsters join this organisation as a chrysalis and become brilliant butterflies in terms of communication and leadership abilities within a short span of time. I suggest becoming a part of this important movement

 The Doer Alone Learneth - Nietzsche

Technical Skills Enhancement

Believe it or not, being technologically capable will be essential in today's world. Plenty of good reasons exists for the same.

• Between the 1980s to 2015 - The IT industry was flourishing and the majority of the back office and mundane tasks were taken care off by the spurt in labour demand to support growing businesses. Taking Murphy's law concept, the growth in technological capabilities (across the boundary - Hardware - CPU, Memory, Storage, Access technologies, Multi-Processing etc., Software - Performance Engineered Programming Languages, Readily available libraries, Open Sources, Tools allowing rapid development Processes and methodologies ) and Customer Experience demands, Networking Infrastructure expansions, Social media, Mobility, Analytics, Digital, IoT, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Cloud and now FOG and EDGE computing etc. has propelled the industry to a whole new spectrum.
• What this means is that the days of old-style technology jobs are outnumbered. The need for Specialists with specialised skills is increasing. Companies are slowly moving towards a "lightweight" delivery model, drawing expertise globally using crowdsourcing, freelancing and other secure work management processes. Sooner or later, a firm could be run totally with a select few business owners/leaders with the entire virtual team getting comprised of independent contractors, diversified consultants, temporary workers and small in-house team stretching as moonlighters. Per some research was done and published, companies are already moving towards such a light-weight model that has both pros and cons. By a study done by a famous big-5 consulting firm, it is said that future businesses would consist of business owners and a fully virtual workforce. There will be a need for just-in-time specialists to support. A permanent paycheck could become a thing of the past in private, corporate world.

 A link with a good analysis/pdf can be found here.

•  A lot of big players known to recruit in thousands in campuses are i.)reducing the intake by half or more than they normally do. ii.) delaying the onboarding date for staggered intake to reduce the training and bench costs iii.) moving to a "probationary internship" or "trainee" model to have an advantage. In simple terms, it has become an "employer's market" - similar to early 1990s.
• Take a few examples - IITs in India had reduced the number in terms of 1 Crore+ salaries. A lot of start-ups have had a no-show in big campuses. A lot of Engineering and MBA graduates are applying for menial Government jobs and doing some work for mere existence. While it's a separate debate on what caused this and seasonal impact, it may repeat and continue for quite some time.
• Once a famous CEO cynically quoted (in the 1990s) that he can recruit people like one takes brinjals in bulk from a farmers market - Similar approach was followed by certain firms to an extent. Well, definitely not anymore.

 What are these contemporaneous services firms are doing now? The firm's credences are getting challenged by their clients to squeeze the costs, deliver more with less, more innovation with fewer costs, more features with less time, more thought-leadership with less number of team members. Gone are the days of "headcount" driven metrics for many of these firms. It's all about innovation. If you wonder how a firm with such a conundrum will succeed in a knowledge economy, it all comes to people. How the cogent team builds a culture of innovation with a growth mindset.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. - Heraclitus

As a new entrant to corporate, how can you be successful? Well, having a technological hegemony and a product engineering mindset could be one criterion that could culminate in success. How do you build technological skillset? Well, practice - Programming, Algorithms, Data Structures, Artificial Intelligence, Probability and Statistics could be a great set to start. While in campus you can focus on having more attention on youtube videos or podcasts available on the Internet. I would need to write a multi-part article if I need to cover all these brilliant resources available.

For one, you can compete informally in contests run by codechef, topcoder. Practice sample question sets available in IUPC contest websites. Watch and read the Open Courseware curricula by MIT, Stanford and lot of other brilliant institutes that is available freely on iTunes University, Youtube. Join free courses in Coursera, Udacity, Udemy and hundreds of other tools.

Wherever you go, go with all your heart - Confucius

On a personal note, I try to do programming regularly and it keeps my learning curve improve and give a feeling of being relevant - albeit not as a full-time job anymore and learnt Angular JS and Python last year and found it was very easy to pick-up, given my earlier experiences. I feel it is definitely important to keep one technically relevant.

If you take the example of one of the richest persons on the planet, Mark Zuckerberg who is a programming genius, who could very well retire and focus only on philanthropy for rest of his life, took a challenge this year. He took a challenge to write a virtual personal assistant driven by AI that allows him to automate the most of the household chores. He did it. In 100 days. The end result is just mind-boggling.

Some links/articles and videos about this enormous feat.

 "To put that in perspective, I spent about 100 hours building Jarvis this year, and now I have a pretty good system that understands me and can do lots of things. But even if I spent 1,000 more hours, I probably wouldn’t be able to build a system that could learn completely new skills on its own — unless I made some fundamental breakthrough in the state of AI along the way." - Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook)

Also - see the Zuckerberg Hiring approach at the following URL. If you are very keen to join product design or product engineering, I suggest you follow the passion for differentiating yourselves. If you are passionate about technology and programming, get into product-based firms in lieu of a services based ones. You can also become techno-functional product managers if you are really keen to get into business facing functional management role. It will be good to get a grasp of the industry you are in - over the years, build business acumen and get some management or product management courses done. This will be useful especially if you get a chance to speak to veterans and people who have done this and learnt their traits.

What is the key takeaway from all these? It is very simple, good leaders always look for the best and one needs to try to be the best they can be to get the good outcomes. At the end of the day, try to do your work passionately and aim for perfection. This small, repeatable activity can become a habit and take your career a long way forward.

 "Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc. " - Guy Kawasaki 

If you feel you don't need to be hands-on, think over. All the high-paying jobs these days need to have cross-functional skills with a technology angle to it. If you want to be a very good wood-cutter, you need to sharpen your axe. If you need to have a brilliant technology career, you need to sharpen your mental axe and change the outlook. This will take one a very long way. A good video will help you think over.

Finally, if you really want some good links on graduation and motivational speeches, I suggest reading through the following.

 I hope you enjoyed reading through this curated collection of links, a personal perspective and inputs on this topic. Feel free to like, share or comment on what you think!

Credits: Header and most of the images are designed using CANVA. All other linked quotes and images available on the Public Internet. All Links correspond to public URLs available and credit goes to respective authors and linked directly in the article. Quotes are freely available on the Internet for reference. Respective trademarks owned by corresponding firms. Opinions highlighted are from a personal experience standpoint and in no way reflect the views of my current or past employers or clients.

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