Category: Careers

Soft skills can help you land an IT job

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nov14-glAfter a couple of years of lull, India’s Information Technology companies are back to hiring. For instance, TCS is planning to hire 25,000 people from the campuses in 2014-15, and hire 35,000 people by 2015-16. Infosys said that it would hire between 15,000-16,000 freshers for the current financial year. from established IT companies, there are more startup companies that are making a beeline for the placement season.

However, the employers are looking also for soft skills in freshers. Mr Ajay Mukherjee, Vice President and Global President and Global Head – Human Resources, TCS is quoted saying that from an improvement point of view, “we have been telling institutes that communications and soft skills are something that can be looked at…which will make people a bit more ready.”

Only few engineering colleges have taken proactive steps to impart soft skills training for students right from the first year. The concept of soft skills is not new and in the past these skills have been known by many other names, often prefixed by life, success, survival, people, communication and interpersonal, team and negotiation skills and the like.

According to Francis Petes, author of Soft Skills and Professional Communication, the key components of soft skills are:

Self Image: You need to have an accurate picture of yourself that is you should understand what your strengths and weaknesses are.

Interpersonal Skills: Self control, empathy and motivating those who operate from a different competitive framework .

Branding Skills :You should promote yourself but also know the subtle difference between branding and bragging.

Networking skills: The essence of networking involves meeting people and socializing with charm and wit, building and nurturing relationships.

Assertiveness: The art of dealing with difficult people without upsetting them.

Conflict Management: Resolving disputes amicably by going to the root of the problem and working out a solution.

 

Communication Skills: It is the most important part of soft skills. In business it is very important to be able to communicate effectively, both verbally and in writing.

 

Stress management: Stress happens to be a part and parcel of our professional life. However, proper training in stress management can help you create a balanced and effective lifestyle. It includes among others self awareness.

 

Since placement record is a key performance metric for engineering colleges, it is worth investing their time and effort in providing soft skills training to their students. But students can take the responsibility on their own and hone their soft skills with the help of professional trainers and training institutions, if they are serious about getting hired.

Go Digital, Get Employed

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Oct14_employeedWhen professional to find information today their first choice is Google. They search internet even before they speak to their friends. Okay, now what do people do when they want to find people, instead of information?

More specially, in the context of finding people for jobs, where do organisations go? They conducted campus interviews and selected candidates. Campus interviews make sense when employees want to hire in mass scale. However, for many just-in-time hiring of special skills, organisations try internet.

Candidates should make themselves findable or searchable online. This means having your presence in:

  1. Professional social networking portals like LinkedIn, and
  2. Having a personal website, and better updating your thoughts, experiences, and recent projects in these places.

Your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn comes with many features to bring your personality in different colors. To begin with write a 100 to 300 words long summary using keywords that might attract a headhunter or employer to your profile.

Increase your connections – find friends , mentors, relations who have a LinkedIn profile and connect with them. The more connections you have the more your profiles will be easily accessed. Get your skills endorsed by people for who you have worked as an intern. You can get the endorsements from your professors as well.

Your own personal website

 According to Workfolio, a company that develops applications for professional visibility, 56% of all hiring managers are more impressed by a candidate’s personal website than any other personal branding tool—however, only 7% of job seekers actually have a personal website.

A website gives you creative freedom to express your personality in ways that are not be possible through your resume. Everything and from the bio paragraph you write to the design , options you choose for your website could give recruiters more chances to decide if they want to bring you in for an interview.

Make sure that your website has a brief bio of yourself, your resume , professional summary/objective, samples of your work, a blog, videos and other relevant multimedia, and testimonials. With these two tools, you would be better off in the job market.

Structural Engineering:Career Opportunities Scale New Heights

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mar_14_bFrom tents to skyscrapers, we have come a long way. Till about thirty thousand years ago, we were hunters. We moved from place to place looking for food. We did not seem to bother too much about shelter – for hunters, a permanent shelter does not have relevance.

We lived under open sky, trees, and caves. However, soon we started trying our hands in making temporary tents using wood sticks, and animal skins to protect ourselves from sun, wind, and other natural forces. The art and science of structural engineering started with our understanding of constructing tents, perhaps the first man-made structures.

Now thousands of years later, we build houses, and skyscrapers. Recently, a group of engineers have unveiled their plans to build the tallest building in the world. It is called, Tall Tower, and its height will be about 20 kilometers, reaching the stratosphere. A building this high poses many structural issues, and we don’t know if it will ever be built. Tall Tower will need more than 985 million tonnes of steel and would have to withstand jet-stream winds of 500 km/hour!

We have constantly advanced our understanding of structures that we can now conceive the Tall Tower. However, still the challenge is the same: to deal with the same natural forces and make sure that our buildings do not fall down. The science is named civil and structural engineering.

According to Wikipedia, structural engineering is a field of engineering dealing with the analysis and design of structures that support or resist loads. Structural engineering is usually considered a specialty within civil engineering, but it can also be studied in its own right. Structural engineers are most commonly involved in the design of buildings and large non-building structures but they can also be involved in the design of machinery, medical equipment, vehicles or any item where structural integrity affects the item’s function or safety.

What is a structure?

A structure can be any assemblage of materials which is intended to sustain loads. Writes, J E Gordon, Author, Structures or Why Things Don’t Fall Down, “Structures are involved in our lives in so many ways that we cannot really afford to ignore them: after all, every plant and animal and nearly all of the works of man have to sustain greater or less mechanical forces without breaking, and so practically everything is a structure of one kind or another.

When we talk about structures we shall have to ask, not only why buildings and bridges fall down and why machinery and aeroplanes sometimes break, but also how worms came to be the shape they are and why a bat can fly into a rose-bush without tearing its wings. Why do birds have feathers? How do our arteries work? What can we do for cripple children? Why are sailing ships rigged in the way they are?”

For the sake of analysis, structures are usually classified in the following ways: line elements (bars, rods, columns or cables), surface elements (panels, deep beams, tension and compression membranes, and any other two-dimensional equivalents of line elements), line elements that carry load by bending(beams or arches), surface flexural elements (plates or shells), and hybrid elements (beam columns that are subject to axial load and bending).

Career Opportunities In Structural Engineering

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mar_14_careerToday, there is an emergence of a new variety of structures. We are building sports stadia and high rise buildings of unimaginable sizes. The design of buildings, bridges and other structures will be required to make many technical decisions about structural systems. Further, evaluating the safety – the strength and stiffness, and planning for the erection of structures are gaining importance.

Hence, the career opportunities in structural engineering are on the rise. The key role of a structural engineer is to design efficient, economical, and attractive structural forms for our buildings and other constructions. A structural engineer will also have to carry out a structural analysis that establishes the internal forces and deflections at all points produced by the design loads.

A career in structural engineering offers an exciting opportunity to contribute to the design of the built environment. If you enjoy subjects such as mathematics, science, computing, art, geography, design and technology, and have an interest in unusual buildings or structures, then structural engineering could be the career for you. Other subjects which you may wish to study include: computing, design and technology, art, and geography.

Why Is Project Management Important in Today’s Business

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Most entrepreneurs are already aware of the dynamic nature of business environment. Every organization, big or small, has to take into account the time, resource allocation, scope and budget required for each project. Only when these factors are well accounted in Project Management, the business will boom and bring good results. So, to effectively meet the dynamic nature of projects, Project Management is a must in business.

In today’s competitive world, delivering quality service or a product is seen as imperative for business survival. If a business fails to show this tendency and repeatedly makes a same mistake again and again, it is certain that it needs a more strategic and flexible approach to survive. It is either through a proper Project Management process or through proper Project Management tool that an organization can become effective.

Also, now-a-days, most clients associated with projects, are very keen to know how their projects are being tackled and developed over time. In fact, some even want to monitor the projects, from the beginning to the end, giving feedback or reviewing each stage. In such cases, Project Management in business becomes more important and managing it through well featured Project Management software is a good option.

Finally, the struggle of many organizations to implement and apply Project Management in business has led to many success stories.

Through Project Management application in business, many organizations are now being able to focus more on project needs by categorizing them into various phases of development, such as project initiation, project planning, defining objectives, project execution and delivery to systematize the entire Project Management process.

Earlier, the most common goal was project completion, rather than fulfilment of needs. Very less emphasis was given on quality standards. But now with more advanced Project Management tools and techniques, things have changed. Many organizations want to have an organized and well structured schedule for entire Project Management process. This has helped businesses build robust clients and deliver quality results.

Project Management is a discipline, which ensures effective communication, collaboration, sharing of progress reports, visibility to expected risk factors for stakeholders of projects. So, Project Management is seen as an essential element for any organization to gain focus on priorities, time constraints, budgets, measurement of performances and become more flexible over time to ensure that all risk factors and errors are rectified correctly.