Dream Jobs… Here we come

Vijay Vaidyanathan
Information Technology Management
GMBA - April 09

This is a cartoon by the famous cartoonist R.K.Laxman. There was once a time this was almost true. The years after the Dot Com bubble were a boom time across the world when economies and organizations were growing at a rapid pace. Companies went on huge recruitment sprees to satisfy the seemingly ever growing demand for talent. Any student entering college was virtually assured of a job and students from top colleges bagged mind boggling offers from employers.

But sometime last year, everything came crashing down. The real estate bubble in the US burst triggering a disastrous chain reaction, plunging the world economy into a deep recession. The honeymoon in the job market came to an end. Millions were laid off. The campus recruitment dreams of students vanished into thin air.

Most of us here at SPJCM have temporarily pressed the ‘pause’ button of our career journey to take up the GMBA course. We hope that after the course, when we press the ‘resume’ button, our careers will take the fast lane of the career expressway. Although there are numerous green shoots appearing in the world economy, we are still facing one of the most difficult moments of our careers.

Nowadays employers are using so many different innovative ways to select the best talent amongst us. While technical competence and business knowledge is very important, it is the people skills that ultimately play a very important role in helping us land in our dream jobs. However technically competent we are, it is the impression that we create during our interviews that will seal our fate. We prepare in various ways to help crack the job interviews and bag those coveted job offers. One such method that the college helps us with is the ‘mock interview’.

We have in-house communication skills faculty in our B-school who conduct mock job interviews once every month in order to prepare us for the real world. The entire interview setup is replicated and we are interviewed by our faculty. The proceedings are video recorded for us to review our performance at a later point of time. We also get immediate feedback from the faculty on our performance with pointers and tips to improve ourselves. We are reviewed on various aspects – Our attire, body language, comfort levels, eye contact, structure of our answers, the contents and even the folders that we carry our resumes in. This is very useful exercise and prepares us for what is to come.

We prepare for these interviews in a number of ways. We write down important pointers, search the internet for various interview questions and prepare answers for them, frame answers for some of the common questions, rehearse in front of mirrors, rehearse with our friends etc. After all, practice leads to perfection. Without any effort from our part, there will be no use attending any number of mock interviews and workshops.

We firmly believe that success is waiting in store for us and we are prepared to do what it takes to achieve it.