How did your career journey lead in your current organization?
I was just finishing business school and came to campus as part of a job placement program. It was a very small firm back then with only about 100 people(Wedding Website Concern), but I had a classmate who had joined a year earlier, and he had great things to say about it.
Because I was a fresher with no prior experience, I like to say that I was professionally born and raised at organization. The company is constantly growing and evolving, which means I keep growing and evolving too. I started as a management trainee for an ERP functional testing project, then went on to work with the Insurance BU and later moved to HR as part of company. Now I’m the head learning team fostering the spirit of lifelong learning in our associates and helping them progress in their careers.
What are some of the key skills you think every associate should possess?
I believe that to be successful, you need to have a strong mix of hard skills, soft skills, and leadership capabilities. For instance, if you’re working on digital transformation for a client, hard skills like AI or full stack engineering are important, but at the end of the day, you’re solving a problem. You’re designing a future. And you can’t do that if you’re not able to grasp what’s happening in the world or understand how human behavior works. That requires a whole different set of soft skills; you need to be empathetic to your consumers and learn what their challenges are. You also need to be able to work with people from different cultures and with different thought processes.
Why is continual learning so important to our associates’ success?
The industry is constantly evolving, which means you cannot survive if you don’t continuously learn. Think about it—some of the tools and capabilities we have now, no one had ever heard of five years ago. Tech skills also have a really short half-life. In other words, over a certain period of time, half the skills you have today will become obsolete as new technological trends emerge.
Beyond staying relevant, continual learning fuels your career growth. Because the sharper your skills are, the better equipped you are to move into a position at the next level and earn more money.
As someone who is on a journey of continuous learning, what’s one of the first things you remember learning?
I don’t know if this is my first memory, but it’s certainly one that continues to guide my learning. When I was a young boy, I was studying in a convent school and there was an extracurricular class on Saturday. I thought the class was at 10:00 am, but when I got there, the class was ending because it had actually started at 9:00. I was aggressively arguing with the teacher, insisting that she had started the class too early, and she said, “It doesn’t matter if the class was at 9:00 or 10:00—are you interested in learning now?”
That changed everything for me, and it’s a philosophy that I continue to use to today. If you run into a challenge with someone, you can deal with it in a confrontational way or you can tell the other person, “Okay, whatever happened, let’s forget about why it happened and talk about what a potential solution might be.” That way, it’s a win-win for everybody.
Conclusion: We always have to learn new things in current technologies, so so we’ll be well-positioned in your career.
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