Never STOP Learning

The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent recession have created genuine concerns in the minds of the youth about their career prospects. But as the adage goes, crisis creates opportunity. Perhaps no one can vouch for this better than Padmanabhan (Paddy) Killimangalam, Senior Tax Manager, Deloitte. During a recent webinar, he shares his thoughts on how recessions have impacted his career, the importance of investing in oneself and how he perceives the organisations of the future. Corporate Citizen brings you excerpts of the fascinating session

"Every time you interact with a company on social media as customers, you are providing intelligence to the product maker, to the platform selling the product and you are helping them improve"

Don’t lose sight of

I will be sharing the experiences of my career, how they have helped me and how they can help prepare students in their career during the next few decades of their lives. I have been with Deloitte for 10 years. Deloitte is one of the largest professional services firms in the world. We serve nearly 80% of companies on the Fortune 500 list. I am part of the Deloitte Tax India Services Pvt Ltd. I lead one of our key emerging practices, i.e. Global Information Reporting. This is a brand new line of businesses which we have started in 2015. It has grown significantly over the past five years. Before I took on my current role, almost all of my career has been in Human Resources, doing different types of things. I started my career in 2000, in the middle of the dot-com bust. The situation was very similar to what we are seeing now. When I completed my undergrad and I got a diploma in software programming, I was exploring opportunities for work, and it was not the most conducive environment to find a job. I say this because that resonates with what is happening right now. I got my first job with a firm which did customer support for US clients. It was a pre-cursor for what we know today as the call centre. Now, the BPO industry has matured, but back then, it was completely unknown. That was a brand new experience for me, because when I was studying, there was no BPO industry, and when I passed out, BPO companies were hiring. I make this point to emphasise that your job of the future may not exist today. You may be a couple of years from completing your education, but there will be many career avenues that will come up at that time that don’t exist today. It’s important to have a goal and prepare for a career, but do not lose sight of emerging industries and roles because those could end up being the future.

Every cloud has a silver lining

Another thing I learned from this experience of starting my career during a recession, is that every recession brings with it a series of opportunities. I would say from my personal experience that the tech dot com bust of 2000 had a big role to play in the growth of the BPO sector in India, because that was a time when organisations were looking for newer ways of doing business. They were feeling the pressure of the economy. They were feeling the pressure of having to cut costs, and they were having the pressure of having to do things in a more nimble and efficient manner, and this allowed them to think outside the box and focus on their core philosophy while partnering with other organisations which can take care of certain aspects of their business which were important but not core to what they do, and find ways to outsource or offshore them. This was an important strategic shift which led to the world as we know it today. The first year and a half was a time of unprecedented growth. We went from 20-30 people in strength to almost 1000 people. I got promoted to Team Leader in six months. Everyone was getting promotions. But in 2001, 9/11 happened, which kicked off another phase of recession. We saw the impact immediately, and several of our clients pulled out. One of our clients whose project I was working on left us. Whatever I had learnt in my tenure was very specific to that client and that account was no longer with us. I had to relearn everything about a new client and their account so that I could start operating on their account. I went from being a senior team leader back to being a customer service executive. This was a very important learning experience for me. You have to be prepared to absorb shocks, to take a step back and focus on learning and growing. I am happy this happened to me early on in my career because it made me stronger, more resilient and built my character. This was the second experience that I wanted to share. Your career will be very rarely a linear chart. It will seldom be a straight line. It will have spikes and plateaus and sometimes even a downturn. You may have some bad phase, but it’s important to pick yourself up and keep going. When our career graph is going up, it’s easy for us to be productive, happy and nice to people. But what really determines our character is what kind of person we are, when things are not going well for us.

The third experience I want to share is what happened in 2008. This was the second recession in my career. I was working for an organisation in the US at that time which was very involved in the field of mortgaging and financial services. I saw first-hand how a recession can wipe out an industry, how it can wipe out an organisation. This was a very humbling experience for me. It was a wakeup call for me. I had been working for eight years, and apart from the first couple of years, the next few years were an upward track. The reason I brought up this incident is this is when I thought of taking a big risk. I decided to quit working and go back to school to get my MBA. This was a huge risk for me as I was going to give up my job, my salary, and take a loan to fund my MBA, that too in the midst of a recession. Looking back, that was one of the most profound moments in my career that made me a stronger person and helped me learn. My takeaway from this is, it is important to continue to invest in you. It’s important to focus on your learning and development. If you think that you only have to learn in your institutes for two years and then the learning is over, let me clarify that your learning will probably really start only once you start your career. Once you hit the real world, be prepared to learn every single day. It’s the only way to survive and thrive in this world. Learning is lifelong, and if you want to be a successful professional, you need to continue to learn in invest in yourself. Let me also make a nuanced but equally important point. Forget your career and your job, even if you want to live a good life and be a good human being, learning is important.

"Don’t shy away from exploring new opportunities and new frontiers; don’t shy away from trying something new”

Always challenge yourself

The last experience I want to share is that I have been in HR for most of my 20 years career. From 2000-2015, I have played different roles in strategy and HR. That has been my forte. Five years ago, there was an opportunity that came up in Deloitte. An opportunity to develop and lead a brand new field of tax reporting work. It was a brand new regulation. No one else had done it. It was the first year that there was a requirement for this type of reporting. We were trying to build a team of people who would work on this. I was interested and I took the risk and made the change and now I am here in my role as a Deloitte tax senior manager. I wouldn’t have imagined myself doing this five years ago. But I am loving what I am doing now. I am sharing this experience, as an example of the importance of reinventing yourself in today’s world. The importance of reskilling yourself, of retooling yourself. These are important aspects of the world we live in today. My message from this is that don’t shy away from taking risks. Don’t shy away from exploring new opportunities and new frontiers, don’t shy away from trying something new. Don’t hesitate to get off your comfort zone, because that is where real growth happens and that is where success comes from. I can tell you from my personal experience that making the switch over the last five years has definitely pushed me as an individual, and certainly pushed me as a human being. It has given me experiences which I never would have received, if I hadn’t taken this plunge. Don’t hesitate to challenge yourself.

"The workplace is changing to a model where even a customer can be doing the work"

What will the future bring?

Let me talk about the future of work. I can see the future of work in two dimensions. What are the organisations of the future going to look like and what are your employers in the future going to look like? Organisations of the future are going to look different in two key aspects. They are going to look different from an external focus standpoint, and they are going to look different from an internal focus standpoint. It is said that the purpose of any organisation is to maximise shareholder value. That is why organisations exist. What we are seeing is that organisations are rethinking and approaching that statement in a different way. The traditional definition of a shareholder is someone who holds stock in the organisation. But organisations are challenging this definition to even include stakeholders, employees, customers and community. Many organisations today are starting to evaluate their success not purely based on their stock price, but based on many other factors. A lot of organisations are becoming sustainable now, and that is fast becoming a key purpose of most organisations. They don’t just want to be successful, but successful in a sustainable fashion. Organisations are becoming more vocal about their values. Organisations are starting to see Social Responsibility as a fundamental component of their business and existence. My message is that when you look at organisations of the future, they are going to think and behave very differently from the organisations of the past. The key takeaway as you prepare for your career, it is important for you to understand what these organisations stand for, and to find an organisation that aligns with your values, because that is key for you to have a long term successful career. This generation of the youth is very bold and vocal when it comes to taking a stand on issues.

It is not that organisations of the past won’t survive in the future. Some of the biggest brands today will continue to exist in the future, but what will change is the way that they operate. What Deloitte did 175 years back, is different from what it does now, and will be different from what we will be doing in the future. The organisations that will be successful will be the ones which can sense the change, sense the trends, and are able to adapt.

Internally, things are going to look different from three perspectives the work being done by the organisation, the workforce, and the workplace. With respect to work, it is obvious that new products and services are going to come out in the future that don’t exist today. Some of the types of jobs we haven’t heard of yet are going to be created in the next few years, and some of the jobs existing today are going to be obsolete. In terms of workforce, if you look at organisations of the past, the workforce with an organisation was usually homogenous. For example, an IT company hired software engineers. An FMCG company hired marketing people. A manufacturing company hired automotive engineers. This is going to change. The boundaries between industries are going to get blurred. Take the biggest technology companies we have today, like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. Would you call Amazon to be in the logistics industry or retail or technology industry? The workforce of the future is going to be very heterogeneous. The takeaway is that your traditional dream job or dream employer may be from an industry that you don’t even think of today.

The third component is the workplace, and this disruption has already happened thanks to Covid-19. Everyone is working from home. So, what you define as the workplace is already gone through a transformation, much earlier than expected. When we say workplace, we aren’t just referring to the physical location. What we mean is that does the work get inside the organisation, does it get done at the customer location, and does it get done by a vendor or a gig worker? Historically, work was done in the organisation. That boundary is now changing. Every time you interact with a company on social media, as customers, you are providing intelligence to the product maker, to the platform selling the product and you are helping them improve. In a way, we are doing work for them. The workplace is changing to a model where even a customer can be doing the work.