Linked-in to Confucious ?

This is a world of instant choices - Yes / No/ -Click here to agree!  Click here to disagree!

But we worry about our choices being right

Confucious had no such problem – (because he is dead). And also because he was a Know- All.

He discovered the truth about the truth without internet, when he stated ‘to know what you know and to know what you do not know is the characteristic of the one who knows.’

India since the age of the Neolithic when they imported  tooth whitening agents from Germany, meteorite metal for weapons from the asteroid belts in space and philosophers from China, were always famous for their imports.

Imported Chinese Zen philosophers have been popular because they are so easy to understand and apply to local conditions. Indians are very positive about indigenisation.

That is why our Indian Educational system in India got rid of all that thinking crap and decided that the goal of all education was to do what Confucious laid out as knowing – know /not know - Which led to the development of  whole new generation of brilliant young minds.

My son too has prospered and been successful under this system, so I may add that I can vouch for it.

When he was preparing for high school exams he would choose a student who would help him and that used to be always a student who failed in the examination. I was curious about how this worked.

He said “I passed because the portion of the course material I studied came for the exams and the portion of the course that he studied, did not. So by the law of Zen learning -to know what you know is not enough, you must get to know what you do not know from the one who knows but did not have the luck to get the right questions for which he had the right answers.”

It is a foolproof method of passing CBSE board exams.

Simple?

And can be vastly improved if the master and student discuss the theories of probability of the exam questions before the examinations, over chilled beer.

But as we are all aware life is not always simple. Adulthood turns out a little more complex than high school gymnastics in knowledge. It is about the art of congesting bits and bytes. And, of how much Bit to Byte.

Research from California, San Diego University, states that an average person today is exposed the tremendous volume of data thru the internet, television and other media-   around 34 gigabytes of information per day.  Something that it is clearly not designed to handle as of now. This creates serious problems for the brain creating shorter attention spans. We respond to data but have no time to absorb and assimilate it Being constantly subject to information results in shorter attention spans, low memory and mental fatigue.

But that is nobody’s problem but yours.You have to use your brains whether it can or cannot process the data within the time frame and come to a conclusion .And you have no other choice but to choose right.

There was this man who was a great believer of St. Francis.One day, while hiking in the mountains, he slipped and fell off a cliff.While falling, he prayed to St. Francis to save his life. Suddenly, a big hand came out of the clouds and grabbed him, stopping his fall.

“Thank you, St. Francis,” sobbed the grateful man. “I knew I could depend on you.”

A celestial voice boomed out of the clouds – “Hang on – before we go any further, which St. Francis did you call for – St. Francis Xavier or St. Francis of Assissi?”

That happens too…

What about the sheer pleasure of being wrong? Or procrastinating over the ponderables versus the imponderables? It does not exist.

You always have to know how much bit to byte…

My Mother- in -Law presiding over the dining table asks me “how many chapattis will you eat?”

I get one split second for giving the pat reply.

Her commandment for the correct answer cannot be ignored because she is the undisputed descendent of Confucious ( the one who knows all ) , and she says that  being incorrect has dire consequences.

The wrong number from me will either lead to wanton wastage affecting the hungry in the third word countries or my hungry stomach languishing in hunger in the world of the privileged.

I am unable to consult my stomach in the assigned one split second.

I lost the vision of my belly button to that. The internet states that the inability to take the right decision on a number relating to the consumption of round wheat foods can lead to a permanent loss of the belly button.

Right or wrong?

Copyright © 2013,Lima Sehgal
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine and the Author

Jobseekers in India need to truly define is what that www stands for !

Jobhunting on the internet- Why does it inspire such sloppiness ? Is it because it makes us twice removed and distant from human interaction ?


Ever since the PC became an integral part of the job hunting process, a certain element of sloppiness has crept in.

Look at the care we take to camouflage our resume in the brief-case. In contrast, it is with such a devil may care attitude that we flaunt it on the www worldwide. How indignantly we demand the headhunter’s client list before giving him our resume, but not care two hoots about hosting it on every available job website. And oops! The trail blaze of cc’s (carbon copies for the uninitiated) that some of us do…

What Jobseekers in India need to truly define is what that www. stands for?

Perhaps addressing needs is a better beginning.

The job websites are waiting for a definition. Are they supposed to be an information base for jobs available, or an advertising platform for resumes or an electronic placement service? Today, it is a rudimentary service trying to survive by the strength of its hit counter, knowing, that the day the hit counter becomes an obsolete measurement of utility, it would be a beginning to leading somewhere.

How much more time is needed before we understand about the loops of  vacancy advertising that never gets a resume reached anywhere.

Duplication of vacancy content that has no relevence to anyone but the website owners.

What about the services aimed to make you pretty in the eyes of the beholder ? Resume writing, social media promotion, resume blasting, resume showcasing, purple resume borders over blue ones, and the list goes on...

The net savvy job seeker must use the same spit and polish that goes to shining shoes. Just because the PC offers the option of job hunting  in your underwear, that is no reason to discard the outerwear.

(The only dilemma being whether to keep (the) Windows open or shut- pun intended.)

But watch out – the virtual world is getting real.

Copyright © 2013,Lima Sehgal
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine & the Author

Latest Indian Idol - Is that the Winner or Loser?

Popularity shows are good indicators of what one’s thinking constitutes. If you happen to be a worried parent of an adolescent kid whose brain is unreadable, I suggest you start watching T.V. together.

They are a much smarter generation. No Saas Bahu tearjerkers or convoluted joint family dramas. They go for the good stuff. Lingerie fashion shows, sexy stuff on music channels, action, horror and soft porn serials with teenage actors. Good logical choices.

But sometimes it comes as a complete shock to you when, day after day, your kid is glued to the television watching a music popularity show which is a long drawn affair of listening to crappy singers who get eliminated and judges who listen to such crap. Yes, I am talking about both the Indian and the American idol shows.

The amazing thing is that this is the same kid who downloads enormous gigabytes of good music on the cell phone, iPod and laptop every day. Why do kids stay glued to programmes which air substandard performances of substandard performers?

Primarily because it easy to associate with losers. It is a relief from their own unrelenting pressure for performance.

Teenagers in India are so pressurized to perform, be it in school or otherwise, that it is quite natural for them to feel a more sympathetic closeness to the losers rather than the winners. The performers who cry at their failure in public view are revered. Unlike their parents, teenagers can watch a movie where the hero loses the heroine and still call it good. It is quite a relief to fail, even if it is just voyeurism.

We are not good at being impartial judges when it comes to comparing our generation with our kids.

We actually belong to a generation where our ideologies talked of freedom, savings, hard work and moral values. Not that we swallowed it without reservations. Some of it was good enough to be proud of, a lot was sheer rubbish.

And as the story goes, the greatest idol of our generation (we even called him father of our nation) insisted on human dignity and stuff like that. He insisted on ignoring the notice in a train compartment which said that (with or without a ticket) Indians were not allowed in.

But impressions have dimmed, some of the kids of that era graduated into motherhood, and probably forgot.

Today, the parks of Delhi have notice boards saying that children are not allowed to play, but mothers quietly slink away. Because -- Come on yaar, this is not the freedom movement of pre-1947, yaar !

The ideals of each generation change, because, as Author John.V.Gardner stated - “Each generation, presented with victories that it did not win for itself, must rediscover the meaning of liberty, justice – ‘the words on the monuments’. A generation that has fought for freedom may pass that freedom on to the next generation. But it cannot pass on the intense personal knowledge of what it takes to win freedom.”

Values and ideals undergo change. Clinging to the past is good business only for politicians.

So why do we deny our children a basic honesty by letting them decide their own Indian idol? Be it the half naked music diva, the drug ridden poet, or that silly millionairess who can neither count nor account.

And why does it surprise you that for a long time now the Indian idols for Indians have not been Indians. We must have national pride that we have not limited our children’s thinking to the perimeter and shore lines of any one country.

Relevance for each generation is their choice. How dare we impose our ideals on them.Let go and let them be. That has to be our motto.

We gave our next generation the gift of television and internet, but can you blame them if they find Brad Pitt sexier than Amitabh Bachhan?

Copyright © 2013, Lima Sehgal

Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine & the author

Trial & Error in Job Hunting is Amateur

The archaic  attitude towards job-hunting is still rampant. We can’t carry our hide-&-seek skills of the playground into adulthood and relabel it as professionalism.

Take it at grassroot level. Freshers are turned into the mainstream job market day after day, without the ghost of an idea of how job hunting is done. Pushing a baby in a swimming pool all alone is not the wisest method to teach swimming.

The job hunt is specialized. One must know where exactly to reach to find.

For example, out of the hundreds of placement agencies, one needs to work out the statistics of how many to use to get the right hit rate. Not too many, and not too few. And no guessing games for grown-ups.

And the ABCs of how to read vacancy advertisements between the lines should not be relegated to middle age.

Unfortunately, shortcuts are not a sign of being smart. Nor do gimmicks work and certainly neither does trial and error.

Successful hunting does not lie in just the shotgun — whether it has one shot or two or three. Rather, it is knowing when to take the shot.

Copyright © 2013,Lima Sehgal
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet Magazine & the Author

The Great Value of Rubbish!

Its all about garbage!

Take the example of the highest garbage dump in the world. At 26000 feet, the last camp before reaching Mount Everest is strewn with some of the goodies of humanity. Last record estimates almost 3000 tonnes of garbage. Tents, food – cans, plastic galore, and lots of dead bodies of mountaineers ! Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first to climb the peak in 1953, also admits that there is a lot of garbage there ever since!

The other hill resorts are competing with higher garbage figures. As a discerning tourist I am sure you’re still looking higher. I would recommend the trip to the moon. I am told that it has lost its virginity and looks like a teenagers’ room, strewn with discarded electronic equipment!

Garbage is an index of a successful civilization. Progress is about replacing the old with the new. And garbage is a measurement of the speed of progress.

Our status in society is calculated by our ability and speed of converting goods of value to junk. Cars, television, houses, toys, even spouses quickly become junk in the hands of the efficient.

However, I am told by the famous humanitarian Daisaku Ikeda that — “ Knowledge corresponds to the past, it is technology. Wisdom is the future; it is philosophy.” So if your knowledge is greater than your wisdom then you are in trouble. You are in danger of becoming junk.

No one is quite sure on how to handle this. What you know becomes junk and what you don’t know becomes wisdom.

The older you get the more difficult it becomes to do a spring cleaning on yourself. The fact that no one would give us a job today if we were old and experienced comes as quite as a shock to most us.The trick is to junk it all and show as new again. One stroke but not a stroke please.

Our late Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi was careful about showing equal amounts of black and white hair on her head. But now, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Butox and unisex beauty parlours, trends are changing. The hot mail is getting hotter – with advertisements that any muscle can be increased by a few inches. (Though their small print says not That one because its not muscle but cartilage, Sir)!

Grow, Acquire, and Throw! More and more. And better than others.

There are specialists to handle junk disposal. Be it skin peeling, soul cleansing, file deletion or de-fragmentation of the hard disk. (Yours and Your computer’s). There are many others.

But don’t get too clean. Proliferation of rubbish is a sign of hard work and intellect. So it must show. And one must also not forget that the purpose of garbage disposal is only the acquisition of new garbage.

And garbage must exist at all times.

We cannot discard our brain just because we have a new state of the art computer. Though it makes perfectly good sense to. In evolution there is no haste. German anatomist Ernst Haeckel talks about recapitulation. The human foetus in the womb goes through several obsolete evolutionary stages .In the fish stage we have gill slits which is absolutely useless for the embryo which is nourished via the umbilical cord. But because sometime during our evolutionary steps, probably when we lived in the sea, we needed gills, we have preserved the genetic know-how.

Evolution is cautious. It is about addition not deletion. Older systems get modified to new ones – fins to legs, or legs to flippers or wings. That way we are sure that what makes us survive now is protected in spite of the addition of new structures. Our ancient brain, for example still remains even centuries after we added on the neo cortex. We are living examples of walking garbage.

We must fight against the environmentalists so that progress may survive . And constantly remind ourselves that all the eco- friendly civilizations like the Harappans, Greeks and Mayans have not survived.

And in the future we can proudly attribute it to our non bio – degradable shit !

Copyright © 2013, Lima Sehgal
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine and the Author

Give the Job Hunting Freshers a bit of Fresh Air !

Let us loosen up a bit here!

Jobs continue to remain a very serious issue, bordering on the parochial. And we pass on our parochialism as an inheritance.

With the result there is a very curious phenomenon prevalent amongst freshers today – the inability to dream.

We have created straightjackets – the right marks, the right course, the right jobs, the right moves …

The journey from lecture rooms leaves one only at exit points. What about the journeys ahead?

Most of us have to make career choices without any exposure to internships, temp jobs or even obscure work exposure. There is no element of even fun in trying out some little experimentation without a label that directs it. We do not have a plan that exposes youngsters to the concept of work during schooling years.

What we are churning out as the future Indian work force are well educated people, who are excellent in following directions rather than creating them. The mood is to be manager, not manic.

But rather than just having a focus on the sunrise and sunset definitions of companies, a little stargazing would not hurt.

I have often been reminded that the Indian professional does not have the luxury of experimentation. Waggling fingers point out issues about economies, population pressures, competition, shortages and rations.

But let us shake this lethargy — we are not talking jobs here but exposure. We are used to paying companies for what should be free internships and paying educational institutions for giving us work certificates, so why not create an environment of free exposure available to youngsters?

We must not forget that blueprints are not maps for the future.


Copyright © 2013Lima Sehgal

Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine and the Author

Yes, Boss

Bruce’s spider made a point.

Until I read the story, I always believed that persistence was a congenital defect. More often than not, it’s not a matter of choice as much as a lack of choice.

Especially in the matter of earning a livelihood. Which is no longer a rat race, but a full blown entrepreneurial effort at contribution. And it is no longer enough to be good enough.

Today, like never before, there’s an extreme demand for creativity from individuals. Not only as an end result of severe competitiveness in professions, but also in the demands of day to day life. Routine is getting to be a redundant phenomenon. Each day brings a new set of battles to be fought and won.

How to keep the caverns of the mind a virgin territory sprouting new creative ideas requires more than a flashlight search. Now that research has proved creativity to be the purview of every individual, naturally a lot of ancillary support theories have sprouted to tailor make the phenomenon. And living in an era where we are so used to the concept of a Pill for every ill, we swallow everything wholeheartedly.

Unfortunately creativity is not about choice; it is about competence. Be it in a profession, marriage, child rearing, or whatever else. It does not come in a formula of ten easy steps – it translates into lifestyles.

Let me quote from a book. “As a creative thinker you firstly need the raw materials from which new ideas are made: facts, concepts, experiences, knowledge, feelings, and whatever else you can find. However, you are much more likely to find something original if you venture off the beaten path.”

So, we go about with a frenzy to collect fodder for creativity. Our kids don’t waste time gazing at clouds, but lead structured lives – dance class, computer course, sports, hobby classes, music lessons, etc. We do the same – newspapers, magazines, books, internet, etc. The in-thing today is networking. Earlier you did for the contacts with people who were useful to you, but that is a no-no for the creative way.

The modern management gurus advocate networking with people of diverse backgrounds for what they claim will give you ‘a different perspective and new avenues of thinking’. Put a whole bunch of people with nothing in common together for socializing, and what emerges is a common Herculean effort by all to end an evening – quickly. But you can’t form a club on that.

We have begun to believe that input equals output, but does it? Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Extreme busyness, whether at school, kirk, or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.” And he was no fool.
Perhaps our focus is the problem.

We invented the deadline, which has become our greatest excuse. We work in a frenzy up to a point of time, and then take decisions and announce results.

But what is the right timing? Is it when you have done your best, or when it is the time to stop trying? I don’t know about the romantic notions of the fruit falling from the tree only when it is ripe, but I do know that we do what we do – when our boss or our client tells us so.

Well, who has the time today to figure it out. Or, to try and try again. Bruce’s spider would probably be unemployed today.

Are deadlines the excuse for a lack of confidence, or a justification for the production of sub-standard stuff? That needs an honest answer.

Maybe what the pundits forgot to mention was the fact that we work so hard in the pursuit of creativity and that in itself is self defeating. Perhaps the mad frenzy of application of methodology is an excuse to escape from our own inner sense of perceived worthlessness. Or, a guilt for a lack of achievement for some perceived goal.

Or, simply, an utter lack of focus.

 Readers Digest published a survey conducted by a leading womens’ college in the US – “Women spend 78 hours a week doing housework. Out of this time, 20 to 25 percent is devoted to cooking, serving, washing dishes, planning menus and shopping for food. These figures may come as a shock to many readers. What about canned foods? Frozen foods? Prepared mixes? Paper plates and napkins? The answer seems to be that American women have used the time saved by inventions and conveniences to raise their standards of performance rather than to contribute to their leisure.”

It is not important who comes first in the Chicken and Egg story, but it is certainly time for a new one.

Copyright © 2013 Lima Sehgal
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine and the Author

A Professional Nanny for Jobhunting

Much as we would wish for comforts in the job hunting process,the hardships and loneliness of the process  whacks us each time.

It  seems like it was only yesterday that we were into the golden era of job-hunting comfort. We could even relegate the dirty stuff to a professional nanny.

We enjoyed it all – The experts who held our hand and told us how to do it.

There were professionals out there for us, for making the perfect resume; there were service providers with the perfect technology of sending our resume everywhere. Someone proficient who did the mass mailing of our resume, handled our job alerts, and told us about everything that we needed to know but were too afraid to ask.

They are all still there for us- But …

Like the pujari ,who on you behalf explains to your favorite deity that you need money, cannot actually be held responsible for paying your house rent on time.

Yes, when it is time to do what has to be done one realizes that job hunting is still about individual strategy with everybody, including those million placement firms that still need to be contacted but with a personalized game plan.

Strangely, I wonder why we all have forgotten that intelligence still counts most.Formulas, be it intravenous drips, pills or in feeding bottles, are always questionable to debate.

Copyright © 2013,Lima Sehgal
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine and the Author

The Job Seeker's Sixth Sense of what won't work

Over the past two years, the Indian Professional has discarded many misconceptions about the job market.

For better or for worse, the perspectives are clearer.

It is a big relief to know that the grass is no greener on the other side of the fence, and the competition out there is competing just as hard.

Reality, though unsavory, is preferable. It comes as a relief to know where one stands – even if one is not standing on one’s own two feet.

The guilt of not trying enough, or not knowing where to try became the gullibility on which service organizations mushroomed. There is a very fine line between giving help and giving jobs. Jobseekers need more than a formula that works only if all the ingredients are right. Anyone knows that it needs more than that to bake a cake.

But, now, there are diminishing takers for resume mass emailing services, for registration of resumes on websites, for training programs to motivate your soul, or for the ‘How to succeed in an interview’ toolkit.

Jobseekers are now demanding authentic services for real needs. Not just a packaging and props industry.

The Indian jobseeker has developed a unique self confidence, born not from the discovery of a niche or from the acquisition of job offers, but from an understanding of what really does not work.

This sixth sense has now become an instinct.

Realizing that in the ocean, the predators are not the only competitors is sometimes the one single chance we give ourselves.

Copyright © 2013,Lima Sehgal
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine and the Author

The Pious Predator

The Pious Predator

Lima Sehgal

In this whole exercise of defining who eats who, we tend to lose our perspective on our positioning.

What matters the most is who is above us in the food chain- never the one below.

Another problem we humans have is that the persons above and below us tend to resemble our own species.

Other species don’t have that problem.

The rat has a cat or an eagle to worry about but they do not resemble distant cousins.For some rats cheese has become suspect because it usually comes with steel strings attached. All said and done, a rat does not usually need to worry about another rat.

We have to worry. Since up above and down below the food chain there is another human, who directly or indirectly holds the responsibility for our food.

Hungry? Well it is not really about food only- but all roads do lead to the stomach ultimately.

Life is fairly simple. Eat when you are hungry. But the exercise of finding food in the refrigerator is a complex exercise in the technology of putting it there. It requires at least 15 years of education combined with sucking up in boring jobs, or a series of acrobatics to persuade someone who loves you, to put it there. Only to discover that there is always a queue in front of it – that is also called a food chain.

‘Me eat’ has been our prime philosophy since the dawn of evolution. Me eat ‘you’ has been the definition of all success in the primordial forests of carbonic ages long past.

So why do we need to be polite?

Why has predation has become a dirty word? Simply because up and down our food chain is another of our species, another human who wants to bite into what we have to bite.

Those who are proficient in the art of biting invented a defense against competition. They invented a science called the Tactics of Share.

There are many people who are not so proficient in this science and are confused about what share is exactly supposed to mean.

The mean get meaner when those who are mathematically challenged not only flunk at kindergarten but also lose gigantic pieces of sandwich to those who were superior in long division.

But grownups are not supposed to be mean. Share is fairly simple in our world -You give and I share. The politician is good at it. So is my elder sister.

Not like that leechy salesman selling insurance at my doorstep predating on my money. Time he learns from that blind guy with a tin cup who takes what ever bucks I can spare everyday.

Yes, I can see you agree. The good guy is the one who takes the smaller bite.

The baby is a small biter - so he is good. But all 49 year olds who are big biters are not good especially if they have not paid me for their big bites.

I am only writing all this is because someone told me that writing articles that no one understands will make me as famous as Vyasa. Look how famous the Gita got to be in every country that was non Sanskrit speaking.

But my Mother is not impressed. She says that this article is not authentic.I can never be a good writer on predation because I married wrong - I do not have a sole bread winning husband with a government pension.

Copyright © 2013 Lima Sehgal
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet Magazine and the Author

Professionals?

Do we, as Indians, also have an assembly line that is focused on the making of professionals?


Lima Sehgal

Professionals are not born – they are made. Unfortunately, not in a test tube (though hi–fi science fiction may soon become true), but in the assembly line of life.

Do we, as Indians, also have an assembly line that is focused on the making of professionals?

Unfortunately not. Our educational systems are obsolete. The acquisition of knowledge for the sake of knowledge still reigns supreme in our system – application is secondary.Take our primary education as an example. Very little formal training is given on skills essential for surviving in the world we get to face as grown ups. Protecting our kids is a basic instinct, but we carry it too far when we also protect them from learning the harsher realities of life, believing that kids are incapable of the reasoning and logic to handle them. We have created an artificial world of childhood. Our education is quite cut – off from life. It’s amazing how, after years of learning the 3’R’s memorizing text books and frolicking in playgrounds, we still expect an end product packaged with the right combinations of skills and   abilities required to succeed in life. Sowing dead seeds and expecting a harvest?

What is even more amazing is everyone’s surprise when, in spite of the best school, college and professional training, you still turn out to be a half–hatched egg. Like most of us are.

Much as we would like to put the blame on individual aptitudes, we can no longer ignore the fact that we are too slow in reacting to the kind of inputs required, and too lackadaisical in responding to the changing demands of our environment. It is no wonder that all of us look at successful people with so much awe. They’ve made it, in spite of the utter lack of support from any of our systems that contributes so little to the development of individual competence.

A dangerous development of modern times is our role models. There was an international survey conducted by Cartoon Network some time ago. Children across Asia were asked to name their most admired person (role model). 60% of Indian children named one of their family members. Of these, 30% said mother, and 21% father. This generation will lead lives which will be totally different from their parents lives. Our role models – teachers, parents, successful people around us, as well as the sports stars and the movie superstars – will be getting outdated during our own lifetime. Their methodologies for success will become obsolete. They can no longer be a beacon for our future. We have to blaze our own trails –alone.

To succeed, we have to become professionals, which by definition is a person having the requisite know how of winning. How does one manage that in an environment that simply does not propagate professionalism?

For starters, take our attitude towards money.Life today is governed by commercialism like never before. We are what we earn, but we are still hostile about the concept of money as a driving force Sanjay V., a seasoned Chief of Personnel, says “I never offer a person a job if I suspect that getting more money is the  person’s main motive for changing a job. The person may be tempted to move again the moment he gets a better offer. “ Money mindedness has been a derogatory term. The traditional money lender is hated world wide.

We resist change. We continue to be obsessed with our past, because we know we are getting obsolete by the minute. We bask in the glories of past achievements sprouting our qualifications on our visiting cards and littering our conversations with anecdotes of our achievements. It doesn’t work. Joe E. Brown, comedian, said “If you have to tell people you’re rich, you ain’t”.

The older you get, the more insecure you become, and more involved in reflections of past glories. We have to protect ourselves from getting old, and we need more than cosmetic and physical solutions. We need to first shift our focus to the future, see what is required, and make our adjustments accordingly.

We must take a lesson from the dinosaurs. They got wiped out of existence because they did not grow in intelligence to cope with the factors that caused their extinction. Or maybe, such a possibility never caused them much worry.

It shouldn’t happen to us.

Copyright © 2013, Jobnet magazine, issue 109
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine or the Author

The English Factor in Jobhunting

The English Factor in Jobhunting


Lima Sehgal

The fundamental issue is not being addressed.

English.

English is still a universal platform (in spite of misguided political debate), for the job market. Today it is the language of the Internet and that makes it an essential skill for the job-seeker.

The fact that our schooling systems are producing people handicapped for competing in the job market by not adhering to higher standards of proficiency in written and spoken English is not bothering anyone.

The job-seeker is bindaas too .The Internet is mastered as mechanically as a textbook. Emails go with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. But what is really worrisome is that many cannot read and understand what forms they are filling but do so anyway. Mass mailing has become a way of life for those, for whom a whole paragraph on a site resembles a bewildering Shakespearean drama text.

What is sad is that by the time a job-seeker realizes the importance of English language proficiency, it becomes too late to go back to kindergarten.

The job market has gone global and no one will come to our backyard with a translator for our local lingo, however much we feel we deserve it. With competition so fierce, it is time that the Indian Job-seekers concentrated on their P’s and Q’s as much as on their www’s…


Copyright © 2013, Jobnet magazine
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine