Jumpstarting Your Career

Successful corporate leaders due to their vast experience in college and corporate life are treasure trove of knowledge to give guidance to students of fresh batches of MBA courses. The students with the help of this guidance can complete the course successfully enabling them to have a future good life as well as make their alma mater and parents proud of them. At the recently held induction programme in Sri Balaji University, Pune (SBUP), at its Pune campus, corporate leaders from leading companies and entrepreneurs, shared their experiences from corporate and student life and gave valuable advice to the fresher students of 2023-2025 batch of MBA courses. Corporate Citizen brings you the excerpts of this valuable guidance from the alumni

Create strong network of professionals

-Deepak Rai,
co-founder and CEO, Pulse Play Digital

Deepak Rai

You have to attend classes every day, come rain or shine, only then will you be in the top five percent income brackets in India and abroad. Parents have spent their 20 years of life and money on you. Now is the time for you to take responsibility and go forward. Don’t worry about your background, just go through the time you spend in the college, with energy and a smile on your face and give your everything. By spending two years at the college, you will be making next 40-years of your life, which is at stake now.

Entrepreneurship is built through network of customers, vendors, partners, collaborators and the team you are part of. Register yourself on LinkedIn and daily introduce yourself to two to five new students in your college campus to make them friends, so you create a strong network of friends in next two years. Don’t be with the same group of students—don’t be in comfort zone. Daily sit with a new student in the campus and make friendship. You have to build a network because your network will be your net worth. As a business person, you have to invest in your network. So create it from now onwards and you will have a big network of professionals, when you enter the corporate world.

Connect with people to have no dull day

-Gopalan Kannan,
vice-president, sales general trade, Godrej Consumer Products Ltd

Gopalan Kannan

I started with handling Rs 50 lakh annual sales turnover in Godrej and now after 19 years, I handle Rs 6,500 crore turnover, with 3,000 people reporting to me. Make good use of these two years to enjoy your later life.

In these two years you are expecting from the world, but after two years you will enter corporate world and the entire world will be expecting from you.

So these two years are very important. You connect with people and you will never feel any day is a dull day. You will always have friends to pick you and grow. For the last 10 years, I have been leading an organisation—so anybody can do it.

Upskill yourselves and be focussed

-Sona Mallika Roy,
associate director (sales) - global markets, Quadrant Knowledge Solutions

Sona Mallika Roy

It is up to each one of you, how you make a conscious choice to move ahead in your corporate careers. It's three founding pillars are discipline, dedication and determination. Follow the college rules and regulations as it moulds you into right kind of professional. You need to be serious of these two years as you have obtained admissions to the MBA courses, after a rigorous admission process and with support of your parents.

Dont believe in the popular filmy saying, "Yahi umar hai karle galti se mistake", because this is the best time to make it or break it. These are two best years of your life so be focused. You need to have hunger for knowledge. How are you going to do it? The only way is to upskill yourselves. If you have to stay in the market and stay relevant, how are yougoing to do it? You have to adapt or else you will be out of the race. So, upskill yourself. Take your summer and winter projects seriously, especially it is important for those students who do not have work experience. Because, during your campus interviews, a lot of weightage would be actually given to them. How passionately you talk and the information that you possess—each day counts. So it is important that you pay attention to all this.

Problems are opportunities

-Arup Bhattacharya,
head treasury and vice-president, SBFC Finance Ltd.

Arup Bhattacharya

Inculcate the philosophies of discipline , dedication , determination, honesty, loyalty and integrity in your life. They will ensure that you keep on performing best to your capabilities and ensure you keep up with whatever problem that comes up. If you seem to be in a problem, then take it as an opportunity.

Make it a point that you are able to overcome it. Because, ahead of this problem there is a very significant gain awaiting for you. Hereon it's your life—you have to make hard efforts to move onto the next level and obviously the game is going to change from here.

You can’t have the same earlier rules, you need to have a new plan to move ahead.

Focus on yourself, learn new skills

-Sanjiv Kumar,
associate director- commercial, Mercer India

Sanjiv Kumar

Rather than asking questions to the entire world about what will happen to my career or my life, you start focussing on yourself. You can reach anywhere. Look at every problem as opportunity. If you have the passion and the right thinking, then you know you will be able to solve it. One must understand the risks and limitations. While you may take lot of risks, you may have lot of aspirations, but choose to pick your battles, that is one of the important things. These two years will shape you and have a huge impact on your personal and professional life. You need to stay updated, as everything is changing faster. You have to learn about your own strengths. Find and identify your own strengths, follow it up with your passion and all your hard work, and maybe you all will get very good placements. Focus on communication skills— you need to have very sharp dressing and sharp communication skills. Become good listeners and try to analysewhat you listen. Use these two years to focus on learning new skills, making new friends and making a network of friends. Don’t pick on bad habits in the college and take care of your health.

Let the corporate race begin

-Amit Mahajan,
senior vice-president, digital business and transformation, Axis Bank

Amit Mahajan

Everywhere there are problems. How you make opportunities out of it determines or differentiates one from the other. There is no point now debating whether you made a right choice by coming here. College will help you, but it is your endless outlook to life which will determine the next two steps. Your life should be like six sigmas—quality metrics for quality success parameters, with no iota of error of even 0.001 percent. Take the lead. There are no free lunches. You are a person who will make your destiny. You are in a corporate warfare. You are in a corporate jungle. If you are not better than the best, then you will not get selected in the campus interviews. Build relations and network. Rehearse and practice. The first rule of any corporate culture is to take your notepads and take notes, because our memories are very limited. Be the best, take risk, learning is never ending. Have hunger to learn and to read. College will not be spoon feeding you. College is the best time of life. Your friends are made for life over here. It’s a corporate race here. Let the race start now.

Invest in yourself, your health and your knowledge

-Shaily Bhatia,
vice-president and cluster head, HDFC Bank Ltd.

Shaily Bhatia

Students after spending two years in the colleges will become industry experts if they do it right in complete correct frame work , regulatory framework and everything.

Invest in yourself, your health and your knowledge, in these two years.

Read as much as you want, as there is nothing you cannot learn through reading.

Companies will accept you and reward you, if you perform

-Santosh Sinha,
regional head (West and South India), Akzo Nobel India Ltd.

Santosh Sinha

You will have to improve on patience as you have to attend various lectures conducted here. These two years could be an opportunity—either you will waste the money which has been invested by your parents or make use of that money to better your career and life. If you are on a vacation for these two years, then in future you will not be able to go on any vacation. These two years of college life gives you an opportunity to learn, so learn it. During the placement, a faculty sees capability and intent in you. Nobody wants you to be expert of everything. If you have right intent, then most of you have a chance to get selected and then probably some capability development can happen from your managers and your organisation. If you are performing then people will acknowledge you, accept you and take you in the companies. But, if you don’t have right intent then you are going to waste all the investment.

Once you are a good human being, only then you can be in a position wherein you can manage teams. When I interview a fresher, I will ask theoretical concepts. If you have work experience, then I will ask what have you done in your assigned job. So ask questions till the time, concepts are not clear in your mind. Increase your market value. Competition outside is immense. If you are in top 20 to 25 in your college, you will get campus recruitment by one of the best companies operating out of India but the balance lot will have to go through some struggle. What will differentiate you is your art, your content, whatever you have studied here. After you work for five years and moved ahead in life, it does not matter from which college you passed out. Parents need to frequently monitor their child to take updates, take account of the money they spent and also to help them whenever needed, in what they are doing.

Identify your strengths and weaknesses

-Sugandha Sharma,
country HR, DMI (Digital Lead Management, LLC)

Sugandha Sharma

Presentations will be a part of the life after college, as you will breathe by presentations, live into presentations and keep making presentations. A lot of us do MBAs only for money, because as graduates’ salary is not too high. But in my true sense, it is important to keep in mind, what your vision and values are, because that is going to define and refine you as a professional individual in the corporate world. Corporate world is not only about, which brand of the college are you from? What scores you have all gained? It is just the starting point and there is a long journey ahead. A lot of you will get multiple opportunities and how you bag those opportunities and how you keep in mind what your values are—your vision mission for yourself is important. It is important to know these are the things that I’m good at and these are the things that I am not good at. So you will channelise your energy to develop on the things that you’re not good at while you’ll definitely get opportunities to bank on things that you are good at. So introspect.

You will have to find fun on the run. There is no other way to have fun. If you don’t have fun, then you get stressed. So it’s very important to identify what de-stresses you and hold onto that, cross these two years in college, make friends for life and then go and hit the corporate life.