A HOT NEW VERTICAL FOR THE PLACEMENT INDUSTRY

If appintment pages in the newspapers are anything to go by, I think, i have now a sense of the current  trends in the job market.The number of advertisements is a far cry from the heydays of 2006-07 and most of the advertisers are educational institutions, looking for faculties.

It looks like corporate executives too are being sought after  for faculty jobs in engineering institutes and B-schools, reports DNA :

“ Marcel Parkar, chairman of Bangalore based HR solutions company Ikya Human Capital Solutions, said, “Institutes need good faculty with practical experience to produce quality students.

There are several professionals looking for a change in career as there is not much advancement happening in their current corporate environments. People don’t mind taking lower salaries but they want stability.”

More than the institutes needing the faculty or the executives looking for a career switch into academics, I feel it is the placement consultants, who need a new vertical to combat the slowdown, which has affected their business badly.

The same story mentions that TMI, a leading placement firm, has launched a faculty practice.

“Hyderabad based talent management and talent acquisition company TMI Group has started an initiative called Faculty Practice, which would help engineering and MBA professionals find teaching jobs in private institutes.”

The faculty crunch in B-Schools and engineering colleges is real. The need for experienced professionals to bring in their real life practical knowledge in the class-room is also well accepted. But not all executives are likely to make a smooth transition into a faculty position. Least of all are the corporatewallahs who see an academic job merely as a stop-gap arrangement.

As for the placement firms, who are used to fat commissions of 25-30% annual CTC of the recruit as commission, dealing with the educational institutions may mean bringing in some pricing innovations as most educational institutions are still comfortable following traditional modes of recruitment through print advertisements and referrals.

- G. Mohan

Jobs in Public Sector Banks: A Rising Tide

 

A quick look at the list of recruiters in the IIMs and other B-schools reveals unlikely names of various Public Sector Banks (PSBs) like Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, IDBI Bank, SBI etc.

 

 

PSBs are now on a major recruitment drive. SBI recently conducted the written test for Probationary Officers for 3,500 vacancies. Given below is a partial list of alerts on bank jobs posted in their respective websites.

 

 

· Central Bank of India Clerical Recruitment 2009 – 850 Vacancies for clerks

 

 

· Corporation Bank Clerical Recruitment 2009 – 425 Vacancies

 

 

·  Syndicate Bank wants 1300 Probationary Officers , 55 HR Officers , 400 Probationary Clerks (2009 Recruitment)

 

 

· Indian Overseas Bank Probationary Officer (PO) Recruitment 2009 Bank PO – 1250 nos

 

 

· Canara Bank Recruitment 2009 – Probationary Officers, Probationary Clerks, Investment officers Specialist Officers

 

 

I am perplexed as to why the PSBs have gone into a recruitment drive now. Only four-five years ago, most banks went through a major voluntary retirement scheme where thousands of officers and clerks were given a golden handshake. The stated reason was the increase in automation and the need to become competitive with respect to private and foreign banks.

 

 

Are the PSBs recruiting because bright young minds are available easily and cheaply (Rs. 0. 4 million p.a is the std PO package) in these recessionary times? Have they been given a dictat from their owner, the government, to create jobs in this dismal market  Are they seeing an opportunity to gain market share in the retail financial services market, when the private banks and NBFCs are in trouble? Perhaps it is a mix of all of these.

 

 

PSB jobs were the most coveted jobs in the 70s and 80s, after bank nationalization. They lost favor post-liberalization. Now they have become coveted again. The wheel has turned full circle.

 

 

 -  G. Mohan

 

Corporate Jobs : Facing a Fade-out

 

 

The other day I was watching an interview of Sam Pitroda (a man I have high regard for) on NDTV Profit. While narrating his story of why he returned from the US to India, Mr. Pitroda made a very important point – “The best brains are busy solving problems of the rich, whereas the problems of the poor are far more complex and they need the best brains.”

 

So true!

 

Until recently, the best brains used to join B-schools, law schools, IT and other lucrative professions to serve the rich and thereby becoming rich themselves. The best brains were creating exotic derivatives in the Wall Street Banks or devising strategies for Fortune 500 companies in consulting firms or writing complex enterprise software with the hope of catching the eye of a VC.

 

But the recession seems to have turned the tide away from these jobs. Suddenly people are realizing that along with the high returns, these jobs carry high risks. The Public Sector career looks more stable, even if less paying.

 

In a recent news item on UPSC exam, The Economic Times (ET) has mentioned:.

“As per data received by ET, after filing an application under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, there are 4.09 lakh applicants for the first leg of the three-stage civil services examination, conducted by the Union Public Services Commission, to select officers for the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), the Indian Police Service (IPS) and other government jobs. Indeed, the jump in the number of UPSC aspirants is coming after three consecutive years of decline. There were 3.83 lakh applicants in 2006, 3.33 lakh in 2007 and 3.25 lakh in 2008 — a steady decrease.”

 

The interesting twist is that after seeing a steady decline over the last three years, the tide has turned this year. It is not as if people are moving away from B-schools. In fact, the number of applicants to CAT have also gone up this year by 15 %.

ET says : “ The exact number of applicants for CAT is not disclosed, but 2008 estimates suggest there were 2.7-2.8 lakh applications for around 1,800 IIM seats, an increase of 15% compared to the previous year.”

 

It also appears that the trend of Civil Services officers joining corporate houses also have significantly come down, perhaps due to the downturn and also due to the Sixth Pay Commission. If anything, in this election season a few civil servants are quitting government jobs and plunging into electoral politics. Jayaprakash Narayan of Loksatta party being one prominent IAS officer taking this route. 

 

In an interesting development, Infosys has announced a new scheme for their employees wherein employees can work for Non-profit organisations. In an interview to Forbes, Nandan Nilkani, Co-Chairman, Infosys says: “We’ve also launched a program where an employee can go work with a nonprofit organization for a year and we’ll pay him half the salary for the duration.”

 

Mohandas Pai, a board member and Director, Human Resources and Education and Research and Administration, told The Indian Express that the option was available to 50 of its senior most employees. “They come immediately after the top deck,” he said. Pai said the company has restricted the kind of non-profit organisations employees can work with. “It has to be in the areas of public health and education or in regulatory bodies and industry associations,” he said, adding that these organizations must be secular and not have any religious affiliation. This is the first year of the program and seven Infosys employees have opted for it.

 

The intention of Infosys management is very laudable in making available some of the best brains for solving complex problems in the Non-profits. My own guess is that only a few of these Infosys top managers would be able to make a serious difference in the  non-profits during the one-year sabbatical. The majority would face problems of several kinds. For example,

• They would find it difficult to deliver in the absence of an efficient system and structure , which they take for granted in a corporate set-up
• They will need to work with people who are far-less competent and differently-abled than the regular professionals they are used to. They would take a while, adjusting to the lack of professionalism all around. In many NGOs, deadlines have no meaning, they are just dead lines
• In social issues which they would work for in the Non-profits, the level of interaction with the local politicians and bureaucrats would be very high, which they are really not used to
• By the time, they get adjusted to the difference in the two worlds, the one-year would be up

Even if a few of the best brains stay on to solve the complex problems of the poor in India, we can say something good came out of this downturn. My best wishes to those who decide to take this road. 

 

 - G. Mohan

Rediscovering the Calm Appeal of the Academic World

The world view of students, parents and teachers was very different in India till the early 80’s

For example:

1. The salary disparities were not so pronounced between people employed in the corporate and the academic worlds

2. The concept of choices was almost non-existent in the consumerist sense. If a family had a car it was an Ambassador or a Fiat. Even in branded apparels there were not too many choose from. More money didn’t  necessarily come with more avenues of spending. That somewhat allayed the sense of deprivation among the teaching communities.

Today; even the best of professors in the top ranked engineering colleges and management institutes don’t take home even 30 % of the salaries that middle management executives get in Corporate India.

Undoubtedly, there are a number of sincere and competent teachers in our country who have chosen their profession consciously without attaching much importance to monetary considerations.

 However, at the aggregate level, it is clear that lack of financial incentive has taken a toll on quality of the teaching in the Indian education system

Coming back to the corporate world in India, much of the astronomical pay packets can be ascribed to two broad reasons:

1.      One can get a higher pay packet by virtue of being in a booming industry sector

2.      Or, for handling target- pressures and unreasonable deadlines (which have less to do with knowledge and intellectual wherewithal and more to do with the ability to handle stress)

Today, we know less and less of what really governs and can affect our lives. A glaring example of this navigating in the dark  is the bankruptcy of the 148 year old company like Lehman Brothers which even in the  current year hired a management graduate from IIM Calcutta of  a pay packet of over Rs 10 million per annum. Do we really know how far the impact of the virtual world of finance, sub-primes and leveraging on the real world of manufacturing, selling and consumption can go? Have their effects been played out completely? Is there more to come? What a world of uncertainties we’re living in!

Do the relatively greater sense of serenity and certainty prevailing in academic climes in the current situation increase the viability of an academic career as an alternative to the knowledgeable and  thoughtful among the corporate gentry? I would like to think so.

- Venkat Subramaniam  

The Talent Trap : A Career Lesson from Anil Kumble

 

According to a new book Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin, the role of talent in an individual’s success in any field be it music, sports or business is much lesser than previously imagined. In an interesting anecdote, he mentions that in a batch of fresh MBAs at Proctor and Gamble, USA, two new recruits, one a Harvard MBA and the other an MBA from Dartmouth looked unambitious and least likely to aim for the top job. But both went on to become CEOs of Fortune 10 companies, Microsoft and GE. The individuals being described are Steve Ballmer and Jeffrey Immelt., who became CEOs of Micorsoft and GE before they turned 50. 

 

Geoffrey Colvin attributes the success to enormous amount of hard work over many years. But not just plain hard work of the ‘practice makes a man perfect’ kind. Prof Ericsson from Florida State University, who has researched extensively on this subject says: 

 

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call ‘deliberate practice’.  It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

 

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice.  

 

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.  

 

Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.  

 

The role of a parent or a coach in designing a deliberate practice routine cannot be overestimated. Tiger Woods’ father coached him on golf since he was 18 months old. Vishwanathan Anand had his mother. Sachin Tendulkar had his mentor in his brother first and then Ramakant Achrekar. 

 

This need not be limited to sports or music alone. It can be applied to business too. Here is what Colvin says: 

 

Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, and deciphering financial statements – you can practice them all.

 

Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information – can you practice those things too? You can.

 

 

The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.

 

 

Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it – each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company’s strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill. 

 

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business” – pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.  

 

Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel, as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.  

 

That’s a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice – and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.  

 

Sachin Tendulkar and Anil Kumble have both achieved great success. Sachin was identified as a prodigy, but Anil Kumble was branded as a talentless plodder. Tracing his long journey with Tendulkar, Kumble said, “When Sachin started his career everyone said he would break all batting records, and when I started my career everyone said I would not play more than two test matches. Sachin has had to spend the rest of his life proving people right while my entire career was spent on proving people wrong.”  

 

So everyone can achieve greatness by ‘deliberate practice’! But why then only a few people actually make it? Is this because we’ve not yet cracked the motivation code? We know we need ‘deliberate practice’ to succeed. But we still do not know for sure which are the different factors that motivate different individuals to dedicate themselves in ‘deliberate practice’. 

 

- G. Mohan 

Match Winning Second Innings

 

When Bill Gates relinquished his job as the Chairman of Microsoft to take a full-time job as the head of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he set off his encore career.

 

Well, Mr.Gates is not alone. Seeking a socially purposeful new career among the baby boomers has become a tidal force. Some trend watchers have dubbed this phenomenon as the biggest change in the American workforce since the large scale entry of women.

 

As their numbers begin to swell, those who are opting to seek vocations based on their deep interests – not just to earn a living, hold the potential to transform the nature of work and create a society that works better for everyone.

Mark Freedman in his recently published Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life  has chronicled and commented on the growing trend of professionals embracing the second career.

 

 

In India too, high-pressure jobs, often leading to burn-outs, are forcing many professionals to question untenable trade-offs between bank balance and mental balance.

 

On the other hand, life expectancy is rising and the length of useful productive life is increasing. As a result, the need to have different careers at different phases of one’s life is heightening.

 

No wonder, a growing number of well qualified and experienced professionals are responding to their inner call for finding meaning in their work by breaking free from the prison made of others’ expectations of them.

 

- G. Mohan.

Women in the Indian IT Industry

Browsing through the latest Annual Report of TCS, a piece of statistic caught my attention. Women constituted 28% of the company’s workforce as on March 31, 2008. 28% of 111,407 would mean nearly 30,000 women.

 

One would imagine that the representation of women would be uniform across all levels of the company. But it is far from that. In the board of directors consisting of 11 directors, there is one woman- an independent, non-executive director. In the leadership team there is no woman, at all. In the Management team of 62 executives, there are just three women.

 

A look at the Annexure to the report, giving details of all employees drawing over Rs. 2.4 million per annum, the under-representation of women becomes clearer. Out of 402 executives, included in the list, there are just 24 women executives, just over 5 %. The youngest woman executive making it to this list is 39 years of age and the median age is around 43 years.

 

It is tempting to attribute this to the existence of glass-ceiling for women in the IT industry or corporate sector. I would attribute this more to the fact that 20 years ago, very few women took to technical education and software careers. Hence, we see very few women at the top now Ten years from now the IT company boards would have far more women.

 

IT industry in India awaits for its own Carly Fiorina. 

 

- G. Mohan.   

The Lure of PE Firms

If you have had a fast-track career and reached the corporate summit at a young age.For various reasons, you find yourself unable to continue further as a CEO. What do you do ?    

 

In a growing trend, we see that a large number of fast-track professionals after a stint at the corner office are joining the Private Equity firms. This trend cuts across industry and functions.

 

First of this movement was when Pradip Shah of CRISIL joined a George Soros promoted PE fund. Akhil Gupta of Reliance is the MD of Blackstone India. Vivek Paul, after a successful stint as the Vice Chairman of Wipro Technologies, joined TechPacific a US based PE firm.

 

Among the recent movements are Rajeev Bakshi, the former CEO of Cadbury’s and later Pepsi, as the Jt MD of ICICI Venture. Sid Khanna, the India head of Accenture has also joined the Private equity industry.

 

Now we hear, Arun Sarin, the high-profile CEO of Vodafone is also joining a PE firm.

 

An excellent understanding of the external environment, a helicopter view of organisations and a strong network is what these professionals bring to the table in the PE industry. Big money, satisfaction in mentoring entreprenuers and a relatively unhurried life, is what attracts these pros to join the PE industry.

 

As PE firms grow and CEO tenures get shorter, I expect this trend to accelerate further. 

 

- G.Mohan  

 

Mystic Musings on Career Planning

My friend shouted at the top of his voice, “Are you mad?”

 

His outburst was caused by the blurting out of my discovery of a strange pattern of coincidences in my career.

 

I was born on October 2, Thursday. October 2 fell on a Thursday, five times between my birth and 1997 in 1969, 1975, 1980, 1986, and 1997. In each of these years, my career scaled a new peak. In 1960, it was my performance in my Class VI exam, in 1975 it was Higher Secondary, in 1980 it was B.Tech., in 1986 it was M.Tech (1980) and in 1997 it was Ph.D. –  my academic performances stood out in comparison with other years. In 2003, I created AXELL, a model for transformation of resource to human asset, as a post doctoral thesis. Are these mere coincidences?

 

The invisible hand of the nature plays a big role in our lives without our knowledge. We delude ourselves by believing that we alone are responsible for shaping our careers.

 

We attribute values to objects and conditions based on our infinitesimally limited knowledge of our own selves and the universe. As this knowledge system changes continually so do the values that we attribute to the same set objects and conditions.

 

If nothing is absolute in our ephemeral value system how can we measure any career achievement with it? Since we can’t predict its next state, we are not in control of the change in our knowledge system which in turn decide our value system which finally determine  for us what constitute our career highs and lows.

 

Ergo, career planning is nothing but a futile process of judging something unknown based on past knowledge which is neither robust nor reliable and therefore defies any projection into the future.

 

As if, I’ve not tortured my friend enough, I announced, to his utter bewilderment, that my birth date and birth day are going to coincide again on 2^nd October this year and on that particular day I’ll commence the second innings of my life.

 

Let’s see, this time around, what my career planner has in store for me.

 

Will keep you posted.

 

- Dr. Chinmoy Sarkar.

 

 

 

Technical Education and a Middle Class Fallacy

The following views of mine are in response to the preceding post.  

 

During the late 80’s and early 90’s, when India was yet to witness the mushrooming of private engineering colleges; engineering education was primarily handled by premier institutions like the IITs, the IISc, the IT BHU, Roorkee and the RECs. Engineering education, in India was considered to be a benchmark for quality by the universities and companies in the USA and other developed countries.

 

This was the time when the Indian IT companies like TCS and Infosys discovered the potential of body-shopping engineering graduates from India. These engineering graduates whichever stream they came from could morph themselves according to the requirements of their foreign clients.

 

The US dollar value changed from Rs. 8 to Rs. 11 over 16 years (1972 to 1988). However, over a three year period from 1988 to 1991 it again changed from Rs. 11 to Rs. 31. This sharp devaluation of Indian rupee worked as an incredible boon for the Indian software industry.

 

In 1988-89, when Rs. 3600 per month was considered to be a high salary in the IITs, the software industry began to lure  away graduates by using the strength of US dollars. The highest salary that was offered to a graduate from IIM Calcutta in 1988 was Rs 6500 per month (Rupees six thousand five hundred only! No, I have not missed out a zero!!).

 

The times of big money hadn’t yet arrived. Although, apparently,  all the stakeholders were happy. 

 

 

The companies in the US began to get engineering graduates with a very high potential, to work on their projects, at less than half the cost.

 

The engineering graduates from India increased their earning  potential substantially both in rupees and in dollars/pounds.

 

The Indian software companies converted rupee devaluation into huge profits.

 

 

As the demand for software professionals was on the rise, the relevance of engineering education was reduced to developing basic analytical abilities in students, as these were the only qualities required by the software industry. Core engineering streams viz., mechanical, electrical, metallurgy, chemical or civil ceased have much relevance.

 

And thus engineering in India, lost its  true identity. This  particular phase in India could be compared to a financially challenged but highly talented person being bought out by a rich man to do work that does not require  much talent.

 

As the demand for IT services increased, the market forces changed the game.As a result, the levers of engineering education moved from the hands of  educationists to the hands of the businessmen and politicians who viewed engineering education as the conduit for supplying manpower to the software and IT services companies. Their focus was solely on the placement of the students, rather than on imparting quality education.The pursuit of money supplanted all that is intrinsically motivating about learning.

 

However,  there is something more to  this drop in quality of education. A lot of it can be attributed to an age old belief among the  Indian middle class.

 

According to the middle class Indian mindset, there is a very strong correlation between education  and wealth, even though in the real world the empirical evidences supporting the correlation is not that strong. Look around and see for yourself  who are the people controlling much of India’s wealth!

 

 As long as this fallacy is passed on by one generation to the next, technical education in India will continue to be plagued by quality problems arising out of  misaligned motives.

 

- Venkat Subramaniam.