More in Careers
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Signs of recession in India show in the Job applications to State Bank jobs
India is in a downturn. And the recessionary times are clear. State Bank of India recently received 1.7 million applications for just 1,500 entry-level clerk jobs! The main attraction? Good...
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Gender Bias in Job postings turn women off from applying
A recent study by Gaucher, Friesen, & Kay published in American Psychological Association has suggested that gender-biased words used in advertising create significant issues for women psychologically when applying for...
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US Employee outsourced his own work to China to surf the Net; paid Chinese fifth of his salary, earning six figures
There are many benefits to outsourcing work to out of US, but this is by far the most brilliant of them all. A person living in the US, hired a...
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75% of IIT-B students focusing on hobbies and not academics; don’t know why they came there really
As per Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM), India, coaching for IIT’s JEE examination is a Rs. 10,000 crores (roughly $2 billion) industry. Coaching for admission to the IITs...
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Almost Half (44%) of working Indians believe they have their Dream Jobs; but why is Attrition Rate so high then?
Now, this is quite an achievement! How many of us can say that we are in our “Dream Job”. To have half of the working population believe that they are...
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Why you shouldn’t bother teaching Mandarin to you kid for his future career
This is a very interesting answer from a native Mandarin speaker. Things that I didn’t know about or realized. Read Quote of Tao Tan’s answer to Life Advice: What non-English...
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What can you do with a degree in psychology? (Infographic)
Psychology is a popular major amongst the undergrads in the US. Every year 100,000 bachelor’s degrees are awarded in US every year. So what are the different careers available for people...
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Top 10 most overused buzzwords on Linkedin Profiles
Linkedin is the professional career portal and more for businesses. Interestingly, people who have an account on it, have their profiles up and most of these profiles have buzzwords. Well,...
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What if money didn’t matter?
What should one do in life? How much is money important? Should I go for money? These are the questions that we all have. And the answer is never easy...
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Comparisons of Workers Across the World (Infographic)
It is interesting to compare the employment situation between different countries – how many people work, how they work and what they produce? Here is an infographic of such a...
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Indian kids’ Dream jobs: Men wanted to be Engineers and Women wanted to be Teachers
In a survey across the globe by Linkedin, where it asked the respondents about their dream jobs when they were kids and if they were currently in those dream jobs,...
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From Bhiwani to Silicon Valley – Part 1
By Guest Blogger, Nikhil Garg Rs. 44,600 – this is how much it would cost me to chase The Great American Dream! Yes, today I finally booked my Cathay Pacific...
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Cover Letter of an Overzealous NYU Undergrad to Wall Street Firm Goes Viral
In today’s corporate world, it is important to emphasize one’s own strengths while knowing the weaknesses. And this should be done when crafting your resume. But sometimes people get too...
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What can I do for next 40 years?
A friend recently lost his job. The times are bad so its no surprise that someone would eventually.
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For Long Life, Love your Colleagues!
Do you have a great relationship with your colleagues at work? If not, the chances of you dying earlier than those who have good relationships is lower by 250%!
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Is Seducing boss the best way to the top?
In these times of distressed economy, it seems affairs still work.
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Lack of Friendships and Longer Working Hours
These days we work a lot of hours in office. Sometimes and in some cases these hours are as high as 20 in a day! For many people, there is hardly any life outside office.
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Career Discussions: Creating a Personal Board of Directors
One of the things that most personal development Gurus talk about these days is to treat yourself as a “Brand”.
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Protecting Your Online Reputation: Smart Digital Self-Defense and Insurance against Damage
In the physical world, most people lock their doors, buy car insurance, and take other precautions to protect themselves from harm.
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StaffCentrix – vet out the “work from home” deals
A lot of people are losing jobs. And as more people are losing jobs, there are others who are lining up to take advantage of these people by scamming them while offering “work from home” deals. All sorts of things are promised! From stuffing envelopes to mystery shopping etc. And these things are made to look exotic. Well, most of all this is just scam.
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Important Points About COBRA Subsidy Plan under American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
Wanted to share some important and salient points about COBRA Subsidy plan.
- Valid for people who were involuntarily terminated between September 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009
- To be eligible annual income cannot exceed $125,000 for a single person and $250,000 for a couples
- 65% of existing COBRA premiums will be subsidized by the U.S. Treasury Department
- Subsidies will be available for up to 9 months
- If you declined COBRA coverage after September 1, 2008 you will have the option to re-enroll into COBRA with the above subsides
- Notices of the COBRA subsidies and re-enrollment information will be sent from the COBRA administrator (usually your previous employer)
- Subsidies will be paid, via a refundable tax credit, directly to the COBRA administrators
- Subsidies will terminate if the enrollee acquires a new health insurance plan through another employer or is eligible for Medicare
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3 Innovative Undergrad and Graduate Life Sciences Courses in India
Economy is really bad right now globally. However, even in this economy students can do certain courses that can help them get into useful and paying careers down the road. Here are a few courses that I found would be very useful to students in India who are looking for alternative career paths.
1. Post Graduation in Clinical Research and Clinical Data Management: Clinical Research Education and Management Academy (CREMA) offers three post graduate courses: Post Graduate Diploma in Clinical Research (PGDCR), Post Graduate Diploma in Clinical Data Management (PGDCDM), Post Graduate Diploma in Pharmacovigilance (PGDPhV). In an economy which is contracting but diseases are not, more and more pharma companies from US and Europe will outsource the Clinical Research and testing to countries like India. So, such a course will prepare the students for a good and paying career by the time they graduate.
Contact: 1800 209 3731 or email to mumenquiry@cremaindia.org
Eligibility: Graduate or postgraduate in Life Sceiences/ Microbiology/ Biotechnology/ Pharmacy/ Medicine/ Nursing/ Physiotherapy/ Dentistry/ Homeopathy/ Ayurvedic and Veterinary Science.2. B.Tech. Bioinformatics: This is another interesting program that will equip the students with knowledge and career of the future. The program helps teach the students Computational methods to study, organise, analyse and interpret biological information at molecular, genetic and genomics levels. Genetic research and work specially with respect to its interface with IT and computation is going to be hot going forward. This course from VIT University, Vellore, India helps prepare the kids for that. Btw, the last date for issue and submission of application forms is February 28, 2009.
The University has some very interesting programmes other than this one in the broad area of Biotechnology:
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Unemployment rates and Web Search trends
These days when the unemployment is running real high, the anxiety in the population is going up as well! When anxiety rises, so do the searches for those areas.
Google has given the trends in search for “Unemployment” and how it has gone up almost 3 times this year! It clearly shows that people are looking for stuff that is linked to unemployment – benefits, coaching, ideas, thoughts, help etc. And these are not the times when one can easily move from one job to another and hope that things will be hunkry dory. It wont be! Things will take time to get better. When? is anybody’s guess. I am predicting that this will go worse for next 1 year at least, before it has any hope of improving.
Here is another chart from Technorati – the aggregator for the blogs. As you can see, people are also blogging more on this topic!!
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Personal Review Plan: Frameworks to Evaluate Yourself
These are times when people are looking at their lives and the surrounding chaos and some are seeing their jobs disappear. It is not a good situation. If one is in that period of mid-life where one starts re-evaluating one’s life that has been and that would be, the imperatives and benchmarks are often different. How does one look for a direction forward? I will share with you two “frameworks” that I have used previously in my life.
Economy and My Direction should SynergizeIt is important that one does what one feels one enjoys doing. But we also have to be mindful of where the world is going to? We cannot simply enter a new field or plan our future direction along a direction which the world is moving away from. So, I have found that it helps to sit down and analyze the future “sun-rise” areas. These are areas that are growing and will keep growing on for some time. It will help if you can position yourself in those areas and enjoy the ride as it all grows on. Jumping on the bandwagon? Well, you can say.. but it is more than that.. it is anticipating and forecasting the “bandwagon” of the future!
For this one needs to carefully interact, listen, read up on, and think on areas totally unrelated to what one does. Because if all you know is your area, the chances are you wont know anything else! And that is the key here – to think outside of the box!
This has served me well. When I was starting out in my career and 3 – 5 years into, I realized that I was a strong generalist with strong skills in analysis, so I moved to consulting. And once in consulting, I realized that ERP and technology will grow rapidly and I entered those areas as I moved on. That has helped me a lot in shaping my career over the years. What will I do next in the coming future? Good question! That is what I am evaluating currently.
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Best career options for recession
Jobfox did a study from Nov 2007 and July 2008 to find 20 professions where demand remained high over economically rough periods. The top five are:
1. Sales Representative
2. Software Design/Development
3. Nursing
4. Accounting & Finance Executive
5. Accounting StaffThe problem with this study is that it takes a period that is nowhere close to what is anticipated in the coming future! The future will be very grim from the way things are shaping up! Even the larger banking and financial institutions are falling down.. the oil prices are not giving any respite and the consumption seems to be still going up. In fact fall in consumption could accelerate the recession.. but consistent consumption could further worsen the oil prices and definitely hurt the deficits of US! So, its a situation of being between a rock and a hard place!
John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas discusses with Yahoo-Hotjobs the careers in certain industries which have the best chance of withstanding the recession.
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Standing up to break the run
All our lives we try to fight hard and study to get jobs and create a career.Save moneys – climb the ladder, kill our dreams just to feed our families. There is a certainty and a feeling of safety. Or is it? In these days? Outside of these jobs is fear of risk. To hide from that risk we keep running. Running from the joblessness and running from standing still. What if you just stand in one place and say. Enough is Enough! I will not go on with this. What would happen then? Just try to stop running from your fears and stand up to meet with your dream.
Archimedes said – “Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth”. I am setting the lever.
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Focused and the resourceful grab the jobs they want!
Getting a job when you do not have the right experience or credentials is tough. But if one is smart, he/she can easily off-set that by sheer enthusiasm. It requires focus and targeting the interviewer/company that you are interviewing for. I remember when I first came to US with an Indian company to be trained in an ERP package. The other folks in the team were all experienced in the in-house ERP package that my company sold back home. It wasn’t the best ERP but it had most of the features. And out of 20 in our team, 18 had worked on it for years. So quite obviously they had stronger credentials than I had. But I was determined to grab the project. And coincidentally only one was on offer. I did not know which area it was in or which client of this Big 6 would it be for. However, this is how I went about the process:
1. I looked for the weaknesses of the home-grown ERP that my colleagues had worked on. And the strengths of the new product that we were trained on.
2. Then I looked for my strengths. It was finance and cost accounting.
3. My gap analysis in #1 suggested that the home-grown ERP did not have a cost accounting module which this new product had and was strong at. This, I knew instinctively, was my chance!
4. I sat down to tailor my resume (not fudge). I remembered and listed all the things I had done in accounting and cost accounting in particular from the fact that I was a Cost Accountant to the fact that one of my internship projects had indeed helped that organization save money (Rs I million). I mentioned all that upfront. Along with the other stuff on accounting of course.The interviews happened and I did not over promise on my understanding of technology but stuck to my process side knowledge. Ultimately, out of the 20, I was the only one to get the project, because luckily for me the project that came up was miraculously in cost accounting. Bingo!
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Tweets his way out of Yahoo
There are many ways social networks are used. For dating, friendships and not so legal activities to start with, and then for politics etc. Twitter – which doesnt do a whole lot for the owners (no revenue model really), but excellent viewership and interaction has been used the most innovatively!The politicians are using it (John Edwards used it well). I use it to tweet drishtikone’s blog feeds so everyone can follow them.
But this is one use that I could not have thought of – this guy Ryan Kuder of San Jose was laid off by Yahoo today.
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Three Signs of a Miserable Job!
Ever wonder why you are so unhappy in your job? Well, this Law Professor from University of Cincinnati has figured it out! The rules from “The Three Signs of a Miserable Job” ring true to him:
The first sign of a miserable job is anonymity, which is the feeling that employees get when they realize that their manager has little interest in them a human being and that they know little about their lives, their aspirations and their interests.
The second sign is irrelevance, which takes root when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others. Every employee needs to know that the work they do impacts someone’s life–a customer, a co-worker, even a supervisor–in one way or another.
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Rural B-School Empowers Women in India!
In 1990, I went to Insitute of Rural Management, Anand.
It was and remains one of the premier Business School that caters to Rural Management specifically. It was started with a dream that since Indian MBA students need to understand villages as much as the corporate intricacies! Well, we did learn a lot about rural life. Yet it was an elitist institution of sorts.THAT was revolutionary in terms of business school education.
Now, a lady called Chetna Gala Sinha has taken that concept to its logical conclusion – an MBA school for the rural poor – Mann Deshi Udyogini Business school ! The students are semi-literate who need education in business subjects to start using funds loaned via the micro-finance lenders. This school – for rural women – also helps in spreading empowerment to women.
Sagar of “Development through enterprise” introduces Mann Deshi Udyogini Business school thus:
MDU was started in December 2006 by the Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank (MDMSB), which is a co-operative society providing micro-credit to rural women entrepreneurs in Satara district of Maharashtra state in India. Chetna Gala Sinha, the founder-chairperson of MDU, is an Ashoka fellow and she started the MDMSB in 1998 in order to cater to the credit needs of rural women. According to Chetna, the idea of starting a business school came from an enthusiastic semi-literate woman, who kept pestering her for know-how about the wholesale vegetable business and other startegies to improve her own vegetable business. MDU was started in December 2006 with a Rs. 7 lakh (about $17500) grant from HSBC.
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The MBA school divide in India
There seems to be a divide amongst the Bschool graduates in India. Those from metros and top-tier MBA schools are going for the corporate jobs, while those in the second tier cities are opting for the public sector.
Students from those business schools which are located in tier-II cities, such as Ghaziabad, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Dehradun, Jaipur, Indore, Kochi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune, expressed eagerness to join `scheduled A’ public sector units (PSUs) like ONGC, NTPC, IOC, GAIL, HPCL, BPCL, SAIL, MTNL, said the survey by Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM).
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Diversity Recruiting – guest article
Here is another guest article from the authors of the book “Recruit or Die” – Chris Resto, Ian Ybarra, and Ramit Sethi
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Diversity is one of the most difficult, and sometimes controversial, aspects of college recruiting. Competition is fierce, and the number of quality minority candidates is disproportionately low. Consider the plight of employers in the technology sector. Of all engineering students across the country, only 6.6 percent are African American, 7 percent are Hispanic, and less than 1 percent are Native American. One recruiting manager from a medium-sized software company said, “It makes me pull my hair out.”
We are confident that you can improve your diversity recruiting results by using the strategy and tactics throughout this book, but here are some additional guidelines for approaching this unique front in the war for young talent.
Define the diversity you want
There are many reasons you may want to hire and retain a diverse workforce. Perhaps you want your team to reflect the diversity of your changing customer base. Many consumer products makers, for instance, seek to hire people of certain ethnicities specifically for their insights into the expanding Hispanic market in America. Or maybe you just want to ensure that your employees can offer different perspectives to help you better tackle complex problems. -
How to manage you career for ever.
Here is some excellent advise on how to manage one’s career from TheLadders.com newsletter (William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson). I think everyone should print this and keep it up on his/her desk for life!!
- Document your accomplishments at the end of each week. This will ensure that you have an accurate record of the value you provide, making it easier to update your resume.
- Google yourself every Monday morning and ask yourself if the results truly reflect what makes you unique and compelling. Determine what you need to do to build a stellar online identity. Here’s an assessment that will help you evaluate your current online profile: www.careerdistinction.com/onlineid
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India creating more jobs than any other Emerging Market (including China)
Rather surprising news but still interesting… India is creating FAR more jobs than any amongst the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China)!
A study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of rich countries, has brought out the pleasant fact that India has been generating more jobs than any other BRIC – Brazil, Russia, India, China – country.
OECD’s Economic Outlook 2007, released on Tuesday, has revealed that India generated 11.3 million net new jobs annually between 2000 and 2005, which is over 60% more than the 7 million new jobs created in China every year.
The performance looks even more impressive when contrasted with another emerging giant, Brazil. The South American biggie clocked 2.7 million new jobs created annually over the five-year period, while Russia saw some 700,000 new jobs added every year.
India, in fact, generated half the jobs in BRIC nations: a performance which must be way better than any of the OECD countries growing at a much slower pace.
At 22 million new jobs every year in BRIC countries – which make for over 45% of the global labour supply and account for a quarter of the world’s GDP – faster economic growth meant that employment gains were more than five times faster that the 3.7 million new jobs created in the 30 developed countries that are members of OECD.
But the smart figures can hardly mask some of the underlying worries: the figures underline once again the continued problem of low employment elasticity – potential to create fewer jobs with every 1% increase in GDP – which has remained constant at 0.3%.
In other words, a stark reminder of the need to grow faster in order to create more jobs. Again, while the four economies have made good gains during the five years, the report pointed out that a large section remained unemployed particularly in rural areas.
It estimated that there were 130 million surplus workers in rural India. Besides, finding jobs for women and youth in India still remained a problem.
There was some more bad news packed in, with the report saying that at 50.5% the employment to population ratio in India was the poorest, compared with at least 66% in the other BRIC countries.
Though India can draw some solace from the fact that the unemployment rate was the lowest at 6% in 2005, issues related to under-employment and the veracity of data spoil the show. Over 94% of the work force in India was employed in the informal sector, which was much higher than the other three BRIC countries.