Career 404 : Life me kya karna hai?

Check if you are an audience: Anyone who will be a part of placements (Students, Startups and companies) at all IITs, NITs and other engineering colleges.

A few weeks back wrote career 101 -- close enough to HTTP 101 : when your-life protocols change :). I do not claim it to be very helpful to everybody but yes it was very helpful for some students. Continuing from there only.

I think this is the last chance for you to understand and figure out what you want to do with your life. I won’t help you in choosing one but I will help you in getting the real picture about any career option. Correct me if I am wrong.

A good number of you “must” be confused what actually you will be doing when you will join as a [‘Consultant’, ‘Business Analyst’, ‘Investment Banker’, ‘Trader’, ‘Software Engineer’, ‘Data Scientist’, ‘Researcher’, ‘Product Manager’, ‘Marketing’, ‘Sales’, ‘Operations’] in an [‘MNC’, ‘Big 4/8 Firm’, ‘Small company’, ‘Startup’].

Even if you don’t know, the good news is you will get a job.

Let me tell you a small story. It will give you fair idea about what you may end up doing.

• A business person wants to open a car showroom business. He/she will go to a consultant to find the best advice where and which type of car he should start with.
• Consultant shows him/her a [‘ppt’, ‘chart’, ‘some pre-processed document”]made by junior consultants or business analysts working closely with him/her. As a consultant your work will be to give the right advice to your client.
• Business Analyst downloads lots of data from a CAR selling companies, does a lot of analysis and reports to consultant to make him take the right decision.
• Now he/she has a big showroom. Marketing people suits well, makes people aware and attracts them to showroom where sales people by hook orby crook convince customers to buy more than one car to meet their weekly target set by their sales managers.
• Operations people take care of supply chain, logistics and operating the business flawlessly.
• He/she decides to have an online store where customers can see the details of cars. Product manager comes up with key parameters and makes layout of the web/android/ios app in paint or some mockup websites like balsamiq, mockingbird before getting it photo-shopped by designer.
• Software engineer comes in shorts and sleepers, develops the online store. Designs UI, database, algorithms and makes it available across world. (Detailed story coming soon)
• Now he/she has grown bigger. Investment banker wears suit like you will try in placements, provides him financial advisory and helps him/her in merger and acquisition of a car manufacturing company after working investment-banker-analysts who work14-15 hours a day in analysing market/data and preparing meaning full excel sheets.
• Researcher in his/her car manufacturing division does some new inventions and publishes papers, files patent and brings new cars in the market.
• Very soon the company raises IPO and does well in the share market. Trader keep looking at their 4-5 screens to buy/sell profitable shares to make money for investors, banks and their clients. They get a good cut of profit which makes them rich.

Originally published here. Accepting suggestions for better stories, typos and grammar correction positively. Please reach out for anything :)