Skills every IT professional MUST have

----from rediff.com by Kshipra Singh

A career in the field of information technology (IT) is one of the most sought these days. Most engineering college graduates land up in the IT industry. While, a job as a software engineer looks very lucrative at first glance, once you get into the industry, you realise that it is not just your technical skills that will keep you in the race.

You need something more to ensure that you are able to do a good job. In other words, you need some extra skills to ensure that you are able to keep the job after you land it. These extra skills are called 'soft skills'.


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What are the advantages of soft skills?
Your soft skills or people skills decide how fast and well you climb the ladder of success. Here are some of the advantages that your soft skills can reap for you:

~ They help you grow in your career
~ They give you an eye to identify and create opportunities
~ They help develop relationships with your colleagues and clients
~ They develop good communication and leadership qualities in you
~ They help you think beyond dollars.

After reading the advantages your soft skills can get you, you would want to know what is it that you need as a technical person to grow as a professional and climb the ladder of success.

Here are some soft skills which will help you grow not just as a professional but also as a person:

~ A never-say-die attitude
Any task that comes to you or your team, undertake with a can-do attitude. Slowly you will observe that you and your team have become the favourite of the management. Every accomplished task boosts your self confidence and pushes you one step closer to success.


From college to corporate: What you need to know

~ Communication
This includes verbal, non-verbal and written communication. Be sure that you are able to put across your point clearly and confidently. As an IT professional you will need to work with colleagues and clients of various nationalities and backgrounds. Ensure that you are able communicate clearly with them. This applies to teleconferencing as well.

~ Learn to listen
Listening is an essential part of communication. Ensure that you listen attentively. This will help make the other party feel comfortable while interacting with you and improve your communications.

~ Be a team player
Help your team members help themselves. Be friendly and approachable. If your team is stuck somewhere look out for ideas to overcome the obstacle together.


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~ Learn to delegate
Chances are you will have junior members on the team. Recognize their strengths and delegate them the right work.

~ Give credit to those who deserve it
Do not all the credit for a job well done. Pass on praise or recognition from superiors to team members who deserve it. Doing it publicly or in front of your boss will further instill a feeling of confidence among your team.

~ Motivate yourself and others
As you look ahead to grow in your career you will need to deal with various people under you. You can not expect quality results from a team whose motivational level is too low. So, stay motivated and keep others motivated.


10 ways to boost your self-confidence

~ Develop leadership qualities
A leader is a person whom people are ready to follow. Develop qualities that will make people follow you not because they are required to but because they want to. Even while operating in a team, take a role to lead and facilitate the work for other members.

~ Control your sense of humor
When you are working with people from various cultures you need to be extra careful with your sense of humor and gestures. Behavior that is acceptable among Indian colleagues might be considered obscene or disrespectful by people from other cultures. Stay away from controversial topics or ideas in the office.

~ Mentoring
This is a quality one needs to develop in order to grow. If you want to grow in the hierarchy, you need to help sub-ordinates grow. Be a good mentor. Help them understand things better. This not only improves the work environment but also improves your work relationships.


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~ Handling criticism
When you are working with people, at times you will be criticized while at others you will be required to criticize your colleagues or sub-ordinates. Ensure that you take the criticism constructively and look at it as an opportunity to grow. Similarly, while criticizing others choose your words carefully and keep it professional. Destructive criticism will lead to loss of respect and trust. Let your criticism help the other person grow.

~ IT-preneur- Like an entrepreneur, have a risk-taking attitude. Learn to take responsibility for failures and pride in a job well done.

~ Managing spoil sports
While working in a team there will always be one or two people with a negative attitude. This attitude can be contagious. Employ tactics to deal with such people and improve motivation.

~E-tiquette
Keep an eye on your e-mails for proper language. Open up the e-mail with a suitable address and end with a thanking note. Your words should convey the correct meaning and invoke the desired action.

~ Multitasking
As you climb the ladder of success, you will need to handle work from various fields. For example, you will have to interact with your technical team on project success, with the HR department for team appraisal and recruitment, with clients on project requirements or problems etc. Organize and plan to fit in all the required activities into your schedule.

Once you have developed these soft skills along with your technical skills you will find that you are a lot more confident about your capabilities.

The ABC’s of a Successful Selling Career

The ABC’s of a Successful Selling Career

Attitude Balance Confidence Discipline Enthusiasm Flexible Goals Health Integrity Just Knowledge Laughter Mentor Network Organized Persistence Questions Relationships Success Time Understanding Vocabulary Work X-tra Y-wait Zero

Begins with the ability to handle failure and rejection. Total fulfillment in all areas: financial, emotional, physical, and spiritual. Act it and you become it. Desire without discipline leads to disappointment, disillusionment, and depression. En Theos = God within IASM — I am sold myself. Anything is feasible if you are always flexible. Short-term and long-term — must be believable and worth committing to. To get rich and sick is stupid. Be trustworthy so people will like you, trust you, and want to listen to you. for today Live in the present moment. Burn the past. Don’t worry about the future. is power when properly applied. is like medicine to the bones.— Proverbs Allow yourself to be mentored and mentor others. With every new person you meet, you expand your potential client base. Pay fast attention to details. Growth occurs when you find you can’t go on, but know you can’t quit. If I say it, they tend to doubt it. If they say it, it’s true. Begin with rapport. Develop respect and give more service than your clients expect and they will give you more referrals. The continuous journey toward the achievement of pre-determined, worthwhile goals. planning I must do the most productive thing possible at every given moment. The first step that creates empathy and builds a long-term relationship. The words we use create thoughts and feelings that result in actions. Combine PLAY and WORK and you’ll fall in love with PLORK. Find more creative ways to give thanks and recognition to your clients. Overcome procrastination by living by these three words: DO IT NOW. in with Zeal Stay focused. Keep yourself in a positive shell and unleash the Champion within you.

Questions

Questions:

Why do we need to Full text search.?

What are components of Replications.?

5 things B-schools don't teach!

5 things B-schools don't teach!

March 22, 2005

Stepping out of B-school into the real world is like learning golf from manuals, or like teaching yourself cricket online. You have all the required theoretical inputs; a clear understanding of the rule book, the jargon and concepts; a dash of history to boot; and anecdotes and trivia as fillers.

As this package comes in contact with reality, it goes through a range of emotions, starting with denial, wrath, angst, confusion, wonder, and finally settles into pragmatism, with bouts of nostalgia and a few clear learnings that are far removed from what the rule books preached.

The moral of the story: the real world teaches you some home truths that academia does not touch upon. In our journey down the road of experience, some of them get etched as gospels. If I were to pick a few of them, and share them here, they would be:

1. Brevity: All the case studies, presentations, analysis and concept notes do not prepare you for the first reality of life. The world does not give you the opportunity to expound on theories over a 40-page Word document, or a 120-slide PowerPoint presentation.

In most real life situations, you get a tiny window in which you need to make your point, in as impactful a manner as possible. The more august the audience, the shorter the time.

From 10-second one-line summaries, to elevator pitches, to one paragraph e-mail, you need to cultivate the habit of being concise. There are no second opportunities in a real-time scenario.

Keeping that in mind, all your thinking needs to be crystallised and constantly carried around, to capitalise on the opportunity.

The clearer the thinking, the easier it is to say it succinctly. I would like to see the day when we put tight leashes around time, space and resources, and start recognising and appreciating brevity as a virtue in academics, instead of letting duration, length or aesthetics drive judgement.

2. People skills: Real life is about real people. It involves dealing with diverse personalities, cultural backgrounds and competencies that you do not normally encounter in B-school. The challenge is, thus, compounded and you often see stars of academia unable to deal with this core reality.

Working with, dealing with, and successfully arriving at mutually beneficial and satisfactory decisions on a day-to-day basis is what the real world teaches you -- sometimes harshly.

Understanding, communication and appreciating someone else's point of view is difficult. It is seldom as the books expound, a clear rational process aided by the theories of people management.

3. Execution: In B-school, all that you learn is from books, periodicals, case studies, which do not prepare you for the biggest differentiator in the real world: the ability to execute.

Perhaps the most understated competency needed, it hits you between the eyes the first time you try to execute a plan, a project or a campaign.

The various parameters you deal with and the fickle nature of the elements are not issues you think about in B-school.

The need to plan with buffers, with alternatives, and the need to keep an eye on the ball at all stages of execution, cannot be overemphasised.

Unfortunately, in our desire to move ourselves up the knowledge curve, there is a propensity to take this skill for granted, and most management programmes don't expose you to this harsh reality.

4. Dealing with failure: Learning to live with failure is another of those often not realised truths. In the real world, we are constantly dealing with the fact that not all decisions, activities, interactions, strategies, or communication translate into success.

My favourite saying is that learning comes from experience and good learning from bad experience. But no B-school teaches you to take failure in your stride.

More often than not, there is enough time to mull over a failure or even lick your wounds. Facing it with grace and bracing yourself for the next set of decisions or actions is what the real world is all about.

We will still deal with the same environment where we failed; at times, lead the same team that could not pull it off, have the same limited facts and figures and information; and more importantly, yet have the same objectives to achieve. It can be a humbling experience, which no education with books or classrooms can simulate.

Dealing with failures is paramount. Otherwise, a propensity to shy away from decision and action for fear of failure can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

5. Multi-tasking: This is probably the most common, yet the most demanding task. Unlike academics, more often than not, executives have to deal with the very real implications of their ability or inability to multi-task.

Financial, organisational and people implications are the riders we contend with. On a day-to-day basis, the ability to multi-task, yet prioritise and drop a few tasks and live with the implications is something no classroom can teach in its entirety.

To quickly estimate the impact, segregate the critical, handle them with speed and calm, constantly scan the environment for changes, and build them into your thoughts and actions as you go through the day, is an experiential learning.

Add to this the fact that often, the information available is scant or incomplete, there are always a few angles no one knew about, the unpredictability of people we are dealing with -- and your hands are more than full. In hindsight, vision is often 20-20, but reality is not.

B-schools do give you an understanding of the tools, aids and theories with which you need to arm yourselves, but where they fall short is in correctly teaching the application and the virtues of experiential learning.

The author is senior vice president, sales and marketing, Prudential ICICI AMC Ltd. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

wishing Bhaiya-Bhabhee happy Annuversary

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Mehka raha hai rishto ko hawa me khushbuo sa.

Khushiyo kii umeed, aur umeed par hausala.
Ase hi joda hai apane yeh tinke tinke ghosala