How to land in a dream Job.

 

 I am a great believer in "Project-based learning". 

Or what is popularly known as 70:20:10 learning.

Also labeled as "ALP - Action learning projects" or "Hands-on" Learning. 

The majority of learning comes from "Doing" or by "Dirtying one's hand". 

Here is an illustration. 

I was talking to an MBA 2nd year student. Almost all of her classmates are struggling to find a suitable job and blaming the whole environment for their struggles. But she landed a suitable job. The icing on the cake is - this is the kind of profile she was eager to join!

With curiosity, I probed - what she did in the last year!

1. Took up a course in Social Media Marketing at a not-so-well-known institute. 

2. Took up a google course in digital marketing.

3. Completed five internships. One full-time and the other "on-demand" shorter in the off period.

All in the area of social media/digital marketing. First, two bullet points are added to a knowledge bucket, while 3rd a skill bucket. (Three buckets are KSA -Knowledge, skills, attitude - backbone of competency) 

No wonder, her passion, and experience paid off.

It would have certainly made her shine in the fresher's resumes & interviews. 

I think a couple of things can ensure, that she can go places, and her career is on a fast track.

1) She shall consider the next couple of years as an "OJT" - on-the-job training and keep a learning attitude.

2) Read regularly, which can be as little as 15 to 20 minutes (1% of the day) daily on digital marketing. Even this little time will be equivalent to 5 to 6 books in a year. It's a power of habit and compound effect. 

3) Find a mentor in social media marketing and digital marketing. 20% of the 70:20:10 formula comes from a good mentor. 

This particular strategy is excellent for getting any job or even in career change efforts too. 

(Sometime back I wrote an answer on Quora for this and got sizeable views in HR community. Here is a brief...)

1. Every job has 3 to 5 core competencies. Identify the key competencies required for your target job. Any HR professional or faculty shall be able to help you with this. Informational interviews will also help. 

2. You can work systematically to develop these competencies. Take the help of mentors/teachers and design ALP - Action learning projects for "hands-on" practice of those competencies. 70% part of the work!

3. Find a mentor for that particular competency or project. Get his mentoring. 20% part of the work! 

4. Read books, and take classes for theory. Participate in discussion forums etc. This is a 10% part of the work!

5. Repeat the cycle for the next competency. 

Though there is no hard-n-fast rule or laws/theories there, you will be able to grasp one competency in 4 to 6 months of period (Mastering will take longer). Thus 3 competencies over a year-n-half or two. 

A period that overlaps your MBA journey. And you will have decent preparation for an intern or fresher interview. 

The presence of projects and keywords will make your resume sail through search strings and short-listing. 

Action learning will make you super-confident in the selection process, which mostly consists of interviews. 

Certain way to a dream job !

(I have worked with a few students and professionals and will be more than happy to help!)

[Image Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Job-1.jpg]

How to decide whether the job is great ?

I wanted to enter academics, and that is the reason I applied for research program at XLRI. The interview committee tried to probe, why I want to switch to teaching community from a comparatively high-income career. I think my answers convinced them.

But the question still keeps lingering in my mind. And often, I hit new theories , that convinces me again and again - that yes it is one of the best choice I made for myself.

You have the best job in the world, if you have inner inspiration to do it. And this inner inspiration, a mental state to a specific job is the result of three critical states. First, is the job purposeful, meaningful, second, whether the job gives you sense of ownership, and lastly do you see the effects or results of job.

A model in Organization behavior gives you five hints to look at the job aspects, and conveys whether the job has these three critical states so as to make it intrinsically motivating (ref. 1).

First is variety of skills, abilities that job activities demand. It is rightly said that teaching is one forth preparation and three forth theater. There is so much variety in teaching. Presentation, effective speaking, persuasion, motivating, and coaching, mentoring, thinking about innovative and new ideas to make lively classes the list is endless. No wonder they call teaching as a performing art.

Second is task identity, whether the task is whole identifiable. In majority of cases faculties are fully responsible for course design, choosing textbooks, delivering and even assessing the courses.

Third is task significance, how much impact it is making in the life of others. Teachers are always regarded high in Indian society. If we consider typical MBA curriculum, learning “people skills” are of paramount importance to any manager, whether his specialty is materials or finance. So no wonder Organizational behavior (area of my specialization) is one of the most important subjects for all MBA’s.

Forth is autonomy, the extent to which one can decide routine details like scheduling, process etc. Now within one’s own class, teacher has full autonomy about what sequence of topics to follow, how much time to allocate to individual concepts and use of variety of pedagogical tools to teach them.Thus giving him the sense of ownership of the class.

Fifth and last is feedback on his/her performance. Though there are formal channels available to students to give feedback. Faculty gets this feedback instantly. As soon as he is half-way through the class, he can figure out, where the students are with respective to the topic he is teaching. Whether he is convincing or confusing?

So next time you are thinking of any job , check where it stands with respective to these five parameters.

- Image source : http://vafamilyconnections.com/images/good%20job.jpg

- 1 : Theory refereed here is : Hackman and Oldham's Job characteristic Model.