Etch your profile well

Have you ever seen an artist at work? He first makes an outline that characterizes major shapes but no minutiae are exposed. The magnum opus follows later. Like a work of art, career planning too involves sketching but with all details included. It is a meticulous and reasonably prearranged procedure. The commonality between the two however, is the need to have an unambiguous image of the final product.

Career planning is a never-ending procedure. It entails adjustments, alterations, and occasionally a complete change of the original scheme of things. Importantly, career planning should commence as early as viable, even if it amounts to doing it ahead of schedule. Some pertinent aspects related to career planning are enumerated in the succeeding paragraphs.

·   Unearth and improve: Every organization prefers to recruit people with prior experience. This qualitative requirement is of advantage to both the employee and employer; and obviously facilitates early settling down. The newcomer understands and visualizes things; and thus is able to make better contributions. Therefore, self-improvement ought to be your prime priority. Professional development and advancement of individual perceptions should be looked upon as a crucial prerequisite for your career planning. If you are able to devote twenty to thirty minutes daily for your own learning and growth, things will be better from you.

·   Look for alternatives: If you happen to be working in a company, it cannot be taken for granted that the openings and prospects available within the department are the only alternatives available to you. To grow and advance, you can move laterally and then vertically. At all times, you have the option to move to another appointment in another division in the same setup; or walk out and take up a similar assignment elsewhere. It is possible that you shoulder twin responsibilities; and should you do this, you will be able to lay the foundation for an enduring and stable career growth.    

·   Assess & pronounce:  This implies taking decisions related to organizational pursuits or even your personal future. There is no management that does not seek to promote eagerness and dynamism amongst its employees. Therefore, a display of passion, inventiveness and enterprise will always be viewed in the correct perspective, provided your ideas are not extraordinarily bizarre. Considering the foregoing, you should not shy away from making concrete resolutions and assessments on issues that concern your career and which, expand the scope of your professional progress. It is not much of significance to feel something; what is important is to make your opinion known.      

·   Be forward-looking: You should have a futuristic point of view. In fact, your outlook should be positive and nature optimistic. If you are able to maintain such a disposition, you will always plan your advancement well; your career will move on at good pace. If there happen to be any impediments, your flow per se will help skirt them, precluding any possibility of getting stranded. Remember that life is all about being in motion; the past and the present should serve to guide you in scheduling the growth of your career.  

The fundamental as well as crucial importance of career planning lies in the enunciation of prerequisites and provisos of self-development. You may dream of gaining admission in a reputed college and if it materializes, perhaps will alter the shape of things to follow. But a dream is a dream; your performance in the entrance examinations will hold the key to its realization.

Young men and women tend to play safe and opt for colleges that have least stringent conditions to fulfill. There may be no entrance examinations or admissions are based on donations, these are facilitators for the not-so-bright. The real complexity pertains to the selection of subjects. However, in order to exercise a suitable choice, you have to adhere to some codes and tenets. Aspects that you need to understand are:

·   The size of the institution in no way characterizes the difficulty planes of the entrance examinations. It is fallacious thinking when you are informed that bigger or reputed colleges have very severe entrance tests. The fact that most laissez-faire educational institutions have on their rolls anything up to five thousand students speaks for itself.

·   A college’s name does not necessarily imply its recognition or reputation; this serves to divert the attention of students. It is however, linked with the two inevitability factors – colleges have to preserve their repute, big or small and accept boys and girls who are willing to join them. This will make it inescapable for you to display your keenness and zest together with a brief of any investigative studies that you may have done.

·   People may narrate to you various accounts, but it is up to you to believe or discount them. Exaggerations will always be there and you have to guard against them. First sight discard is not recommended; you should give a patient hearing and then draw inferences. Hearsays and word of mouth publicity should be seen with caution because they have intrinsic qualities to unfold unfounded stories.

      To conclude, it is your strength of mind that matters. It far exceeds the clout of all conventions, systems and regulations combined. You should never lose sight of your real objective – ascertain all appropriate information, gather relevant evidence and then submit your application. There should be nothing that should inhibit realization of your dreams – you and you alone can chase them and make them a reality.

What is ‘Workplace Ethics’?

All managers have a tendency to talk of ethics and ethical practices. Whether or not they are practiced, or for that matter whether or not they are enforced at their workplaces is a different matter.

What is understood by ethics? It is actually an offshoot of philosophy and seeks to focus on issues of principles through an arrangement of performance and conduct related principles. In other words, ethics can be termed as a procedure meant for enforcing a set of behavioural practices.

No workplace is a picnic place; on the contrary, it is the very livelihood for a large number of people and hence fulfills all requirements concerning individual realization. Therefore, ethics bestow grounds as a yardstick of living and occupation alike. Going by this logic, they keep morality going and facilitate growth; and hence cannot be ignored at any workplace. However, to adhere to them or not is an individual preference, something that cannot be thrust on people but only justified and looked forward to.

A workplace is a group of people with varying perceptions and outlooks and it is but natural that ethics there will stand watered down. But the fact is that the degree of passion, enthusiasm and ardour necessary to bring about an ethical workplace environment is immensely monumental, particularly when an organization is desired to progress in the true sense of the word.

Depending upon person to person, ethics imply guiding principles and actions that have to be pursued to achieve the eventual reality. But their adherence does usher in some element of answerability and liability to life as a whole. If that be so, ethical practices provide rationale and guidance and in the process attaches a connotation to life. Workplace ethics are a result of individual ethics that revolve around:

Sincerity: There is nothing better than being truthful, everybody says so. But very few seem to practice it. More often than not, sincerity that also entails honesty, genuineness and earnestness, is applied and gone through only if it is opportune or expedient. Perhaps this is true, however not forever. A mind that is prejudiced and narrow-minded is incapable of looking beyond and focuses on short-term advantages, resorting to untruth, if required. This is nothing but breaking and running away from reality – an act that amounts to self- deceit. But, for how long can you afford to do it? The aspects of sincerity of purpose and honesty of attitude need to be integrated in one’s disposition as also in those of newcomers in an organization because personal ethics will always vary.

Perseverance:  The fear of perseverance is more than the fear of fear itself. It tends to ambush you within yourself, depriving you of legitimacy and certainty that you ought to be pledging. At a workplace, one cannot refrain from work or promise and hence a very pledge for them serves as a big impelling factor. There is no denying the fact that perseverance has to emanate from inside, but it is also a fact that some cajoling facilitate workers to look inwards and consequently be more determined. Therefore, employees need to be helped to introspect so that they can persist with their work and bring in organizational progress.

Trustworthiness:  Devotion to one’s job together with constancy and credibility is what trustworthiness entails. As the name suggests, it puts together mutual faith and confidence amongst all employee factions; it is a trait that is most sought after in any buddy, ally or colleague. Workplace ethics also has a similar field of view. Trustworthiness and its wider meanings of honesty, dependability, reliability and integrity are traits that need to be preserved. Any stupid doing involving their sacrifice or even compromise will invariably have serious long term ramifications   

Obligations:  Each and every person has a right to freedom, life and assets. We can indulge in any activity, but it has to be regulated by a code of regulations. These regulations are ethics in their innate form. The forgoing implies doing everything in a proper way, lest monumental bedlam prevails.

            Sincerity, perseverance, trustworthiness and obligations are major contributory factors for a congenial working environment. They boost levels of enterprise erudition and business learnedness, besides dealing with crisis situations in a more proficient method. While individual ethics will always vary from individual to individual, they will invariably be of consequence in formulating ethical guidelines of any establishment.

Towards the above, the need to place every worker on to a common podium of ideology, if the requirement of ethical practices may be called so in the context of workplace imperatives, needs no emphasis. Principled or unprincipled, correct or incorrect or precise or vague are ethical queries that only the brawn of discernment and might of acuity can respond to. But, the important part of the matter is that they call for development and progression, the trigger for which to a very large extent can be ascribed to workplace ethics alone.  

Don’t let your job search collapse

In any sphere of activity, if the working methodology is contravened, everything goes to wrack and ruin - like dominoes if one amongst a chain of them is pulled out. Can you afford to flout any stage of your job search?

Any job search ought to be having the following five phases with each one of them being equally important and contingent on the others:

Preparation to sell oneself

  The success of your job search is contingent on the groundwork you do. To that extent, preparation is presumably the most significant constituent of any job hunt effort. It should include the following elements:

·   Capabilities & vulnerabilities: You need to be well aware of what you are, what you are cut out for and what you are weak at. What are your penchants? Knowing them is an extremely important facet and the earlier one gets to identify them, the better it will be for evident reasons.

·   Career roadmap:   You need to be clear about how you intend to move forward in your career. This entails also what you want to attain and at what stage in your life.

·   Probable employers:  After having done the above, you ought to be short-listing organizations that you would be willing to join. Evidently, your choice would be prompted by a host of factors, notable ones being repute, stability and prospects. Since different companies have varying workplace imperatives, you have to decide what you want in life and the degree of compromise you are willing to make.

·   Posturing for employment:  This implies putting yourself for sale. The process entails image projection so that the attention of recruiters is focused on you. On your own, you may not be able achieve much; your networking efforts will stand you in good stead.  

Persuasive cover letter

If you are confident that all your preparations are in place, the next step is to start drafting your cover letters. The secret to a good cover letter lies in ensuring the following:

·   Address:   The letter should be addressed to a person by name rather than appointment.

·   Contents:  The letter should be so drafted that the first paragraph stands out and catches the notice of the addressee. In addition, the contents should manifest buoyancy. While following the principle of brevity, all your major accomplishments as distinct from duties performed should be highlighted. In other words, make the letter acceptable at first sight itself.  

Perfect resume

A resume seeks to explain what you have done so far and how. It tells the other person about your familiarity with and understanding of various issues. It also illustrates your expertise. You should not think of yourself as more than merchandise that a willing employer would be ready to pay for; to that extent, a resume’s important attributes are:

·   Sync:  It should unambiguously be in harmony with your overall personality, aptitude and qualifications.

·   Contact details:  The resume should clearly mention your contact information; this would facilitate a prospective employer to get in touch with you at the first opportunity.

·   Expertise:   Inter alia, a resume should make your proficiency, competence, aptitude and strong-points stand out.

·   Spotlight:  Your resume should not be dwelling on your charter of duties and assigned responsibilities. On the contrary, it should be highlighting your academic and professional successes.

·   Conciseness:   If you are a fresher, a one-page resume should suffice. In respect of anybody else, not more than two pages are recommended. Remember that if it is long, chances are that the person reading it may miss out on your key attributes.

Facing the interview

You can be the most reclusive person by temperament; nevertheless the skill of faring well in an interview can come to you without difficulty. What it involves is gaining knowledge of some fundamental tenets and living out with them. A few rudimentary truths about an interview are:

·   Initial impact:  The first impression is always the last impression. The interviewer would have made a mental pronouncement about you in the initial three minutes itself; what follows subsequently is just a procedure. Inter alia, your interpersonal skills and dressing sense will always have an influence, the better they are, the better you will gel.

·   Having hold:  You ought to be trying to be in command of the pace and course of the interview. This implies that you should be making moves and not simply reacting. You should have prepared your questions well for any clarifications that you may like to seek.  

·   Objective: You should not lose sight of your aim – that you are merchandise being offered for sale. Reticence and diffidence may not pay.

Monitoring & quest

Having a timely system of follow-up is as significant and crucial as the other dominoes. Following-up and following-through comprises:

·   Responses:   You should be taking the initiative to establish contact with employers and seeking meetings or interviews. If you happen to receive messages, responding to them via post, e mail or telephone should invariably be done. Likewise, you should never falter in intimating your decision to accept or decline offers.

·   Gratitude:  Expressing thanks to any or everybody who has been of assistance is always in good taste. You never know that the same person can be of immense value subsequently.

A dedicated approach, sincerity of purpose and high degree of determination is essential to be maintained during all the five phases of a job search. Their importance as dwelt upon above notwithstanding, the fact needs to be understood that mental and physical feebleness at any stage will be a harbinger of fiasco and disappointment.