Choose The Right Career Path

Choosing the right career path is one of the most crucial decisions that we make in our life. It is a really tough task to choose the right options. Youngsters are usually lost in a crowd of options and they simply choose the career of their parent’s choice or follow the path of their friends and seniors without giving it a thought whether it is the right option for them or not, is it going to suit their mental caliber or not? Do they have the attitude and aptitude to move forward on the road to success in the years to come?

Very few people are lucky enough to choose a career of their choice most of them just follow the path of others. It is very important to test your aptitude, mental caliber, interest and attitude before choosing your career line. Instead of giving priority to short-term goals think about your whole life. One hasty decision and your life will become a puzzle. Don’t ruin your life and career; choose your profession wisely and smartly fore peaceful and a prosperous life.

The craze of MBA is ruling the heart and head of fresh graduates and young professionals. An MBA degree from a reputed college is a doorway to success. It not only gives you the guarantee of a better job with a high salary package, but a better career growth as well. Every year millions of students appear in different MBA admission entrance tests to lay the first stone of their success, but unfortunately only few of them can turn their dream into reality.

Success is largely determined by aptitude and preparation. There are millions of candidates competing for the same seat. It is your preparation that determines your chance of success in a highly competitive environment. There are thousands of coaching centers claiming to prepare you for top business school, but it becomes a really tough task for the student to choose. The entrance exams like CAT, XLRI, and GMAT are not easy to crack; it requires exhaustive preparation and strategic planning to clear the exam.

Courses like MBA, MCA prepare their entrance test paper with great care so that they can evaluate the attitude and aptitude of the candidate and choose the suitable candidates out of all the students. One can clear the entrance exam of CAT and other prestigious MBA entrance tests even without enrolling for coaching. Just follow the 3Ds-Dedication, Determination and Devotion and make your way easy.

To score better in your MBA entrance test start practicing verbal ability, quantitative analysis and data interpretation, some entrance exams like SNAP have an additional category of GK as well.  There is a lot of study material available in the market and on the internet, start exploring the available resources and get ready for the big day.

Verbal ability: This section is very crucial. This section involves reading comprehension, grammar and sentence correction. Start working on your vocabulary. Read English news-papers, listen to the words carefully while watching a movie or an advertisement, make a list of difficult words, find out the meaning and try to use it in your day to day conversations. You can find useful study material in the market as well. Practice with workbooks and give tests for better preparation.

Quantitative analysis (QA) is another deciding paper in an MBA entrance exam, though the level of complexity is not very high, it is the test of speed and accuracy. If you are preparing on your own start solving Math’s book of class VI to class X. This section mainly includes problems on profit & loss, time, speed & distance, questions on analytical ability. To score well in QA paper practice regularly, solve the workbook for consistent practice.

Data Interpretation: This section involves questions based on charts, tables, and problems on logical reasoning. You can easily find study material for preparing DI paper. The more you practice, the better you score in your exam.

It is important to score well in all papers, institutes conducting MBA and other competitive exams choose candidates who score well in all papers, for ex:

QA 99.2% percentile

DI99.1% percentile

VA 98.8% percentile

Solving previous year’s entrance papers is the best way to judge your caliber; proper time management is a must to crack the MBA entrance exam.

It is not hard to clear an MBA entrance exam but it is meant for only those who have interest in Math’s, numbers and have a good command over communication skills. It is important to know your attitude, aptitude and caliber before choosing your professional line and in short both capacity and capability for completing the competitive courses and thereafter as a successful executive in the functions assigned by the employer

Health Care Service Management

Health care service delivery has been redefined, and service providers are consistently trying to conform to international standards. This is the reason behind the demand for professional healthcare managers, who can apply established management principles to provide efficient healthcare.

Until recently, retired personnel from the army or medical services managed Indian hospitals. But the sectors evolution into business has led to an increased emphasis on the application of management skills, operational strategies and a sense of ethics to run it successfully, and the new breed of medicine professionals with management qualification promise to address these requirements effectively. Health care is a unique business wherein people with diverse backgrounds and qualification work in the same system, and in order to successfully manage such a diverse workforce, the healthcare manager needs to be adept at fostering change without disrupting continuity.

Though the demand for professional managers in healthcare is still at a nascent stage, investments in the sector by corporate giants like Reliance Industries, Wockhard, Max health care, Fortis, Apollo group, and the Hinduja group, among others are likely to provide the necessary impetus.

Healthcare management is not the only option the sector offers, and apart from formation of hospitals as corporate companies, the socio-economic changes offer an even wider range of career options. The World Bank has been sponsoring healthcare reforms across several states in India starting with Andhra Pradesh in 1994.

NGOs in healthcare also offer an array of opportunities under projects sponsored by the European Union commission, World Bank, Department for International development, German technical cooperation, and United Nations, among others.

The IT sector has opened up to professionals beyond software engineers, and doctors are currently participating in clinical trial interpretations, formerly referred to as medical transcription. A huge amount of data has been acquired by major IT companies and they need trained doctors to interpret this research.

Other emerging areas include Medical tourism, Telemedicine, Pharmaceuticals and Health insurance. A McKinsey report states that India private health insurance cover will reach 20 percent to 25 per cent by 2020. In the context of Health insurance, economics is an area that most doctors are not comfortable with. Hence, doctors trained in these skills are going to be in great demand in the insurance sector, as health economists with a clinical background.
 

FMS started India first management program in Healthcare in 1971 and is currently revising its syllabus. The new curriculum will be more intense and will include emerging components like IT, telemedicine, and insurance, among others. Although FMS is the pioneer in offering customized management courses for the healthcare sector, with the increase in demand for trained professionals other institutes are also customizing their management programs for health segment.
 

The government has iterated the need to groom public health management cadres, and hence, other institutes have also started to offer programs in hospital administration and other areas. Both the All India Institute of medical sciences, New Delhi and the Tata Institute of Social science, Mumbai, offer Masters Program in Hospital administration.

While the institutes mentioned above only offer courses for MBBS graduates, others offer programs open to graduates from all disciplines. For instance, the institute of integrated learning in management New Delhi offers a two year hospital administration course, in association with Max Healthcare.

Around 47 million uninsured Americans are unable to afford private medical treatment in their own country, while in the UK the National Health Service is under immense pressure to meet the demands of an increasing population. In 2006, this scenario translated to over 1.5 lakh foreign nationals visiting India for various medical needs and today global business growth in healthcare ranks second only to retail. The Indian healthcare sector will be worth whopping Rs 1,200 billion by 2012.

 
The bottom line is simple with more portfolios like healthcare economics and healthcare managers being created medicine graduates, who were expecting to continue with their specialization through their mid 30s, now have the option of being part of industries like information technology and insurance, among others, not merely as doctors, but as managers.

Building a brand for self

Employees who can brand and market themselves well carry an image that gets associated with not only their brand name but also the organization’s. Self branding always helps. But the employee should not resort to bragging or pretense. It is a careful study of oneself in a quest to understand what one excels in and then leveraging on those attributes to create a brand called ‘me’. A great communicator for instance, brands himself /herself likewise. Whereas a silent performer carries this very attitude as his/her brand identity.

Personal branding is not all about self promotion and marketing tactics, it is more fundamental than that. It is a clear, deep and profound understanding of who you are and what you stand for. Every organization should believe in playing with the strengths of the individual.

This is not a new phenomenon. It happens in all relationship; people always wish to establish their identify (brand). Branding is a positive and an essential long term process in one’s career as long as it is based on and backed by one’s competencies and achievements. Branding oneself stems from a simple fundamental of how human beings co-exist in a given environment. Humans can exist only in two forms of relationships. Either, they compete or collaborate. Taking advantage of natural opportunities to promote your accomplishments and letting others know what you have done is a good thing and needs to be encouraged. One of the ways to stand out, shine through is to wisely promote your accomplishments and use effective self marketing and self branding tools.

Is it a fair deal for the silent worker whose effort go unnoticed and some other employee who is good at branding himself/herself walk away with all the applause? Branding is neither about making noise nor is it a popularity contest. Hence it does not matter whether you are silent or outspoken. Branding is about what image/brand one wants to build for oneself and how he/she goes about doing it. Building a brand for oneself is a highly individualistic process and what works for one may not work for the other. So, being an introvert or an extrovert does not matter.

Talking about whether it is an unfair for the silent workers. There are many successful introverts. An extrovert or a good orator need not be successful compared to an introvert or poor speaker. Networking and blogging are domains where introverts can beat their more talkative rivals in their own game of self promotion. It would be wrong to say that these silent or the introvert employees miss out on a lot as they do not get the appreciation or recognition as they tend to maintain a low profile. If they are good at what they do their ‘silent’ attitude towards work may even add to their performance and productivity. In fact, at Endeavor, every Project Lead has a special knack of identifying and rewarding the silent performers. Extrovert employees are more suited for the client-oriented roles, where their ability to speak out and good presentation and persuasion skills may do wonders. On the other hand, an introvert employee may be suitable for the back end delivery kind of roles where a dedicated and focused effort is required.

Fairness in this entire process is only about an opportunity being provided to all to showcase his/her success. Leveraging the opportunity is only a function of his/her ability to communicate with confidence. Introversion could be referred to someone who lacks confidence in articulating his/her success openly. Such an employee would expect his/her supervisor to point out his/her success to the rest of the team.

It is imperative for any organization to make sure that their employees gets the right kind of appreciation and does not feel side lined and disappointed. How do organizations make sure that they keep employees who blow their own trumpet at bay and identify the deserving talent? Differentiating a deserving employee from a hypocrite is only about an organization being knowledgeable about human behavior and work performance standards. With so many skilled self-marketers around, leaders need to develop tools and skills to evaluate and reward real performers.

It is very important for organizations to weigh the claims of individuals against time; It is easy to form opinions about employees as professed by them in the short run and determine roles and responsibilities, accordingly. However, a real brand is created only when the opinions are vindicated time and again and the individual delivers consistently over a long period of time.

Hence the moot point remains that as much as self branding is highly recommended for every individual a short term image should not be confused with branding. It’s always in the long run that an individual’s brand gets established. If organizations are good at identifying the deserving talent then the practice of an employee branding oneself will certainly work wonders for both.

GLOBAL DEMAND FOR INDIAN TALENT

Global Human Resources firm Hewitt Associates made recently an Annual salary report once again raising the question whether India will continue to rule the IT roost. The report says that the average Indian salary has gone up by more than 34% during 2009 which is the highest in the Asia Pacific region.

Consequently this lead to a serious thinking process and two important points emerged. One is such increase in wages lead to a dwindling in the amount of business that his country has been attracting owing to its low overheads. On the other hand some industry experts feel since the salary hike is mostly at the top level, the manpower industry will not be affected too much. Rather it will generate more global talent and global standards of working.

The changes have been at the top of the pyramid. An increase in cost at this level will directly see an increase in the productivity of services and operations. Also there will be a reverse brain drain. Indian companies operate at Global standards they are looking for talents with exposure to diverse markets, hence geographic boundaries to find talent at the top level will vanish.

The above will significantly impact the talent pool as even expats from across the globe are ready to take up assignments in India. Indian professionals can now aspire to be global while still being in India unlike in the past where they had to go overseas for these opportunities.

Industry players feel the sudden salary hike is a direct result of the offshore delivery model that has been adopted by the IT companies.

The prime driver is the huge focus on the off shore delivery model being adopted by all major IT companies. All such companies treat their top executives as global resources ready to be employed any where across the world. That is also one of the major reasons for salary parity with other global positions.

Indian organizations grown locally in their constant quest to match global standards and capture larger customer bases locally and also around the world are seeking good talent and therefore are aligning their compensation practices to global standards strengthening their reward management practices and focusing on ‘pay for performance to attract and retain talent to enhance productivity.

Indian companies are becoming Global brands and therefore there is a need for CXOs with Global experience, expertise and outlook. In the present globally competitive environment, CXO slots in Indian firms will have a mix of both Indians and foreigners. It is already happening in many industries.

The pattern in which salaries have been increased is also an indicator that the rise will only elevate the level of performance, gradually getting closer to global standards. The salary rise has been in terms of paid for performance rather than increasing the salaries. The point of reference for most organizations is measuring and managing performance on formal platforms and biannual performance reviews.

Anger at work is a bad attribute

For working professionals, it is imperative that they have a pleasant and a positive environment to work in. However, there are times when this very environment becomes sour and uncomfortable, causing disgruntlement and anger. And due to the current scenario and with the mounting pressure to perform better amongst the ever increasing cut throat competition, there seems to be a rise in unsettling emotions including anger at work. And the result is hampered productivity disturbed teamwork, etc among other outcomes.

There are often moments at work place when employees get angry and lose their cool. The reasons for the same may be many but the outcome is the same leading to low performance, failure in understanding colleagues, and eruption of unknown emotions.

So what could be the main cause for the same? There can be numerous causes for the eruption of anger at the workplace from small petty instances of harassments or abuse, to peer pressure stress etc. Anger builds up inside when expression is curbed. Most people do not have the tact to relate their problems, in an effective yet non-heated manner and to prevent an outburst employee’s bottle up their resentments.

Anger at work can be caused due to various reasons including issues with the boss, colleague, personal issues, etc. Unfortunately stress at work has become the norm rather than an exception. Today it is not enough for you to know the job; it is imperative that you are successful at it too.

Though it is very natural to have varied emotions at work, the impact of every emotion is different. Anger specifically can have drastic impacts on your professional life. Anger clouds perception and is known to fail intelligence of an individual as well as of an organization. Anger at work if not addressed properly can prove to be highly counterproductive. It not only impacts the individual’s morale bit also the performance team dynamics and the work environment. So how do you deal with this emotion at work? What is the best way to avoid such feelings? The best way to control anger at the workplace is to walk away from uncomfortable discussion. It does not mean putting off the issue. It is always better to have discussion and confrontations when you are not in an agitated frame of mind.

When you feel about of anger coming, try to calm down. Once you have calmed down, return with a more rational mind to discuss what went wrong and seek a solution if possible. If you still cannot see eye to eye get a third person to help you.

It is important to learn how to communicate effectively, as it can help one solve anger issues. Losing one’s temper is useless, as it does not get you anywhere

So next time you think you are about to lose your cool breathe. Calm down and let the moment pass, as anger can get you nowhere but out.

Tips of Anger management:

Try counting to ten or think before saying anything. This may not address the anger directly, but it can minimize the damage you will do while angry. Ultimately you want to get the work done or seek information from peers or your team. Anger is not the solution and spoils the way if any to complete the task.

Learn to relax. This is easier said than done some times, but if you find something that calms, you it is a good way to keep your anger under control and a good way to maintain a calm environment in an angry situation.

Laugh it off: Think of something funny and laugh out loud. It is very difficult to be angry when you are laughing.

Step and think before you speak and leave any sarcasm out of the conversation.

"Teamwork divides the task and doubles the success”

Today's world is full of competition; everyone is trying to outpace others in the race. Even though almost every person in this race is talented, it has become very hard to survive. In such situation, working in TEAM can help us in achieving our goals. Team work has become immensely important if we wish to achieve what we dream of!

What is a team?

We can say a team is a group of individuals who come closer to work together and achieve a common goal.

What is teamwork?

Teamwork is a set of activities of group of individuals, which includes effective communication/interaction among the team members which helps in knowledge sharing, understanding each other on personal level, helping others in achieving a level of perfection, building a sense of unity in the team and working towards achievement of common goals.

Following are few basic and most important points that should be taken care of and obeyed strictly by each and every team member without fail:

Roles and Responsibilities

Every individual in the team should very well understand that there are certain responsibilities he/she needs to carry out. Every team member's role is very important in keeping high spirit in team, helping the team in marching ahead on the path of success, helping the team in resolving any problem that can hinder the progress of team etc. Everyone should understand the tasks that he/she needs to carry out in order to ensure smooth operations of the team. Along with this every member should hold him/herself responsible for everything that goes wrong with/within the team and should take necessary steps to avoid such situations

Common goals and objectives

The reason of bringing the team members together should be clearly defined and should be agreed upon. Every member of the team should be aware of the objectives and common goals that are to be achieved and should always try to achieve the same

Communication and interaction

This is one of the most points which can help in bringing out a solution to any problem the team may face. Effective communication is very important, among the team members. Every member should be comfortable with others and should be able to communicate his/her ideas and views effectively to the other team members; this will contribute to the success of the team. Interaction between the team members also helps bringing people close on emotional level. Interaction also helps in creating bonds between the team members and helps the team members to look at the team as a family

Leader

"Too many cooks ruin the food/party!" It is very much sure that every team member in the team possesses a talent pool and can handle a group, but if every team member starts thinking that he/she can lead the team and start taking decisions, it surely will never be in the interest of the team. Instead all the team members should come together and should decide who can lead the team. This activity demands a fair selection of the person as a team leader and who will lead the team towards success. Although, there will be one team leader who will have decision taking power, he/she should consult the team member before taking any important decision. Every team member should listen to the reasons of decision taken by leader, and leader even should listen to every member's view and suggestions. A good advice should always be welcome and any doubt should be cleared.

As it is very important to decide one team leader and support his/her decisions, it is also very much important to help every member in the team to improve his/her leadership and decision making qualities. For this, a Round Robin method can be employed where every member should be given an equal opportunity to manage the team and become a leader for a fixed time period. During this time, the leader should try and improve him/her and the other team members should help him/her in doing so. Remember, one mature brain can help others grow, but more mature brains together can bring prosperity for the team.

Trust among team members

The base of the team and its success is the level of trust/belief of team members in each other. If this trust will not be there, the team will never be able to meet the success. Every member should think about the team's advantage first and then should give a thought for him/her. If one member is taking any decision regarding the team, he/she should convey the reason to other team members and should take their suggestions. And if someone takes a decision, the other team members should support him/her without doubting him/her.