10 things you must know about 21st century jobs
DESCRIPTION
The old concepts about "Job Skills" are changing fast as Internet enters deeper into corporate culture. This eBook tries to give you a concise and to-the-point picture of the new concepts about "job skills" evolving in 21st centuryTRANSCRIPT
10 Things You Must Know About
2 1
st
Century Jobs
By Raghu Pandey
1
Who should read this
eBook?
Why you should read
this eBook?
Before you read this
eBook…
If you are not planning to retire from your professional career
before 2015, this book is relevant for you. If you are a
working professional yet to cross 35 years of age, it is very
relevant for you. And if you are a college student yet to join
the professional world… it‟s a MUST READ for you!
Two reasons, 1) If you want to know what new skills are
needed to achieve a fast career growth in 21st century
corporate environment, and 2) If you believe in „Survival of
the fittest‟ and do not want to be the weakest link in the
organization when next recession comes.
You will enjoy reading this eBook if you have taken the self
test „Are you Ready for a 21st Century job?‟. If you have
already taken it, welcome! If not, it is highly recommended
that you spend a few minutes to take the self-test.
2
CONTENTS
1 Virtual Personality Is More
Important Than Real Personality …page 3
6 You Must Be
A Jack Of All …Tools …page 9
2 Company Office
Is Not The „Company‟ …page 5
7 There Will Be
Dinosaurs Around …page 10
3 Online Collaboration Skills
Are The New Soft Skills …page 6
8 Training & Skill Development
Will Be „Self Service‟ …page 12
4 Netiquettes Are More Important
Than Traditional Etiquettes …page 7
9 Competition Will
Surprise You! …page 13
5 Knowledge Will Be Online
… Only Online! …page 8 10 You Will Have To
Go Green! …page 14
3
1 Virtual Personality Is
More Important Than
Real Personality
I know you have been told in your college that „Soft Skills‟ are
extremely important for getting a good job and building a successful
career. You need these soft skills to create a good First Impression on
the employer, and to communicate well within your team or company,
once you are in a job. Although soft skills will always be important, the
definition of „Soft Skills‟ has started to change rapidly.
If you think that good spoken English, smart dressing, smiling face,
confident body language etc, will create your good first impression and
make you a successful team player… you are WRONG! Your first
impression will be created without even meeting face-to-face or talking,
by your Virtual Personality. It includes your linkedin/facebook/twitter
profiles, and your blog (if you have one). Your team skills will now
mean your Online Collaboration skills, i.e. how skilled & mature you are
in using the forums, blogs, wikis etc. on your intra company portal
(discussed in point no.3). And your „Netiquettes‟ will be more important
than your traditional etiquettes & manners (discussed in point no.4).
One thing which definitely creates a good or bad first impression is your
Email id! If you want to keep your email id „cool‟ or „interesting‟,
please keep a separate one for formal emails.
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As an employer when I see such „interesting‟ ids, this is what comes to my mind… These email id‟s are
fake, but the photos are real profile pics of some final year college students on orkut :)
“…a bit underage for the job!”
“he should apply for a becoming a
DJ or RJ or MJ!”
“We need a software engineer… not a
gym instructor!”
“Your Majesty! Do you have prior
experience of sales?”
“Sorry… we actually need someone
like Jhansi ki Rani for this HR job!”
"We need an accountant with a calcul-
ator to calculate, not license to kill”
5
2 Company Office Is
Not The ‘Company’
Till few years back when Internet and mobile phones were a luxury, all
the work of a company was centralized in the company office. That‟s
why „company office‟ & „company‟ were the same and professional life
was well defined as “9 to 5 in office”. Today with high speed Internet
and powerful mobile phones, we are realizing the true meaning of
company, i.e. a group/team/community of people working together.
In 21st century this community of people has very little dependency on
their physical office premises because they can work together from
anywhere, at anytime, through their intra company portal. Therefore you
can clearly see some trends in the corporate world… Telecommuting
(work from home) is increasing and Business Traveling & physical
meetings are decreasing in numbers. It may happen that you do not
shake hands with your boss or team mates for months as they would be
in different cities or countries (even though you‟ll interact with them
many times daily through telepresence technologies). Your CEO, most
probably, will address your team through Webinars only.
So as a 21st century employee you must be skilled in expressing yourself
and communicating your opinions through online media like discussion
forums and video conferencing.
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3 Online Collaboration
Skills Are The New
Soft Skills
„Collaboration‟ can have many meanings depending upon the context.
By „Collaboration‟ I mean day-to-day information sharing, interaction
and knowledge sharing within a group or team. As discussed earlier in
point no.2, a team can work together from anyplace and at anytime
through Internet. As a result, the number of face-to-face meetings, either
among team members or with your boss or clients etc., will reduce
drastically within next few years. At that time the traditional
communication skills such as spoken English, confident body language,
eye contact etc, and traditional etiquettes & manners will be of little use!
Since most of the time you‟ll be collaborating with your team online,
your productivity as a team member will directly depend upon your
skills of using discussion forums, company wikis, blogs, project
management tools etc. The better you use these facilities, the more
valuable you become for the company. And if you can earn the
reputation of a “Valuable contributor”, your fast growth is almost
guaranteed. “Valuable contributor” is someone who actively shares his
or her professional knowledge & experiences on company blogs, and
takes initiative to respond to people‟s doubts & queries on company
forums. This helps building a personal brand within your company and
you become visible to senior management.
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4 Netiquettes Are More
Important Than
Traditional Etiquettes
Its really good if you are able to impress everybody with your good
manners & etiquettes when you meet them in person… but are you sure
you don‟t seem like a tapori when people read your email or see your
SMS? As I have discussed earlier, in your professional life, majority of
your meetings and interactions are going to be online. In some cases you
are never going to meet some people in person, yet you may regularly
interact with them online. For example your CEO or your division Head,
or an important overseas client etc. so the only impression you can
create on these important people would be online. And that impression
will directly affect your chances of getting a raise/bonus/promotion or
getting ignored or fired.
Do you know the formal emailing and SMS etiquettes? Are you aware
about forum discussion etiquettes (especially for official forums)? Do
you know that many companies have a code of conduct for their
employees for using facebook, orkut, linkedin and twitter?
Although you can read about these netiquettes on the web but you‟ll
need practice to master them. If you are a college student, the best way
to practice is by actively participating on your intra college portal and
taking feedback from your friends and teachers.
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5
Knowledge Will Be
Online… Only
Online!
Not only the company knowledge base, but its quarterly magazine,
CEO‟s letter, various other manuals & guides… everything will be
online. You must learn to search & read it online too.
Have a very good excuse before you tell your boss that “I‟ll get that
book issued from the library and find the solution from it by tomorrow”.
Your first challenge is to become an intelligent and smart „diver‟ so that
you can dive into the ocean of unnecessary information called „Internet‟
and pull out the content which is useful for your project or task. And If
you are have an ADCCP (Advanced Diploma in Cut Copy & Paste),
beware! We are about to have very strict laws on Intellectual Property
Rights with huge penalties & punishments. It will become much more
difficult to plagiarize.
Start making it a habit to check out what kind of license the content you
are copying is published under, before you copy it blindly. I know you
have never done that before :) but it is a great time to start!
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6
You Must Be A Jack
Of All… Tools
By tools I mean software tools which increase the quality & speed of
your work. Whether you want to be an accountant, a lawyer, a
programmer, or a poet, you must know the basic usage of various
software tools to become efficient & fast enough by 21st century
standards. In today‟s world everybody wants Instant Gratification
along with High Quality! Be it food or an official report, nobody wants
to wait for it, and it should also taste or look good. If you want some info
from your co-worker, you want it fast and well-formatted. Your boss
wants that good-looking report from you fast because his boss wants it
fast too. Therefore you should be comfortable creating good quality
documents with text, diagrams, pictures etc. You must also be
comfortable creating decent presentations, and using spreadsheet
software. In India the most popular tools for doing such tasks are from
Microsoft Office i.e. Word, Excel & PowerPoint. But you can get
equally good software for free from OpenOffice.org. Along with office
productivity tools, you must know how to use security software like anti-
virus & firewall, and also backup tools (very important for poets!).
It is worth mentioning that within 2-3 years many of these software tools
you are going to use will be “SaaS” (Software as a Service). You will
use them on the web without installing them on your computer.
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7
There Will Be
Dinosaurs Around
Today‟s dinosaurs are those big companies which are slow to adopt the
Internet in their business seriously, and just like pre-historic dinosaurs
they will not survive the big change. Try to avoid them!
Internet is bringing a tsunami of changes in our life! It is like a tsunami,
because changes are coming very fast and in huge volumes. The
companies which have already started taking Internet seriously will do
well. The dinosaur companies are most likely to be from these
industries:
Newspaper, Airlines, Hospitality, Real Estate & Construction,
Entertainment, and Software.
Newspaper Industry – companies which are still giving more
importance to „paper‟ than „news‟ are dinosaurs. They must realize that
news can be updated 24x7 on Internet not on paper and there can be
lakhs of journalists (citizen journalists & bloggers) on Internet but not on
paper.
Airline Industry – companies which will continue to depend upon
business travelers will become dinosaurs. They must realize that
business traveling is a pure overhead cost to the employers of their
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passengers, and the day Telepresence technology becomes cheap, it
would be really bad for them.
Hospitality (big hotels) – same as airline industry! (Ctrl+C Ctrl+V)
Real Estate & Construction Industry – companies which are not ready
with an answer to following question are dinosaurs: “What will happen
to the demand of huge office spaces and unnecessarily expensive houses
in big cities, when 10Mbps unlimited broadband will be available at
Rs.250 per month, even in small towns of India?”
Entertainment Industry (TV, music, movies) – honestly, if I start
discussing this topic here it would be a fat book in itself… to me, almost
all Indian companies in entertainment industry look like dinosaurs! I
might be wrong.
Software Industry – don‟t be surprised. Internet will only allow those
software companies to survive which are SaaS (Software as a Service)
based. Rest all are dinosaurs.
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8
Training & Skill
Development Will Be
‘Self Service’
Why is training and new skill development important? That‟s because
recent global recession has proved that things can change really fast!
This can happen again and we don‟t know when. Even skilled and
talented people can loose jobs overnight because either the company
they were working for was a dinosaur which went out of business, or its
directors were monkeys who traded the company for few bananas. So
you can‟t even dream about job stability or security in 21st century.
Your biggest job security is to learn the art of acquiring new skills
fast! This will be quite easy in the coming few years.
As discussed in point no.5, not only all possible knowledge resources
will be online, various tools to train and test yourself will also be
available online 24x7. The self-training will happen through
„simulators‟ and self-testing will happen through „computer adaptive
tests‟. Whether you want to become a skilled surgeon, stock-broker, any
designer, any engineer, manager, pilot, or whatever, you will have
specialized simulators for self-training and computer adaptive tests for
self-test & certification available on Internet. Even your employer would
encourage you for self training & testing, and the dedicated training
sessions which companies conduct for their employees (mostly
considered as a paid vacation) will become obsolete soon!
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9
Competition Will
Surprise You!
Competition from skilled housewives, retired people and people from
small towns and villages will become serious! That‟s because
Telecommuting through Internet will completely destroy the barriers
of location. If somebody has the right kind of skills, it won‟t be
necessary for him or her to leave the city or go out of home every
morning to have a full-time employment with a good company.
If American companies can get their work done by employees sitting in
Bangalore, why can‟t Indian companies located in Big cities get their
work done by employees sitting in Ambikapur? (Mr. Sam Pitroda has
said this thing quite often in recent years)
The only factors which stop this from happening today are lack of high
quality broadband in small towns & villages, and low comfort level of
Indian companies with telecommuting employees.
Both these factors have started to improve… watch out!
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10 You Will Have To Go
Green!
Within few years, you as an employee will be forced to go green (i.e.
become environment friendly) in your day-to-day official work. That‟s
because the company you will work for will be forced to go green. And
that‟s because the country in which your company exists, will be (or is
already) bound by international treaties to cut carbon emissions.
Today there are some incentives for organizations to reduce their carbon
footprint (carbon footprint is basically the impact on environment due to
various activities of an individual or an organization). Very soon there
will be laws to force every organization to adopt environment friendly
practices. Then as a result, the first thing your employer is going to
expect from you is to reduce the usage of paper to near zero in your day-
to-day work, and cut down your traveling as much as possible.
Which means you will have to work purely online… be ready for that!
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Now…
Are You Ready For A 21st Century Job … Self Test ROUND 2 ?
(Round 1 was easy! Round 2 will be tougher and it will be industry specific!)
If interested, „Like‟ our Page for the latest updates
There you can also leave your comments or questions about this eBook, or your
valuable suggestions for Self Test ROUND 2.
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About The Author
This eBook Was
Published On
Licensing
Raghu Pandey is the Founder & CEO of iBranch.in, which is
the pioneering Internet company of India, providing SaaS
based Intra College Portals to higher education institutes. He
can be reached at [email protected]
23rd
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