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Part - II

• Is the job utilizing your time or adding to your skill sets: - Skill sets are both technical and behavioral. For example if your talking of a Demand Planning job, a Demand Planner who has worked on SCM packages like i2 or Oracle APO/SAP APS will at the end of the day have skills which are highly valued in the job market, but not demand planning done in "Excel". Behavioral Skill sets are complex to explain but you know the usual set like Team Working, Leadership etc etc. This happens when the job offers you opportunity to meet a lot of professionals. Sometimes you choose a job if you find it adds to Behavioral Skill - after my engineering I opted to work as a Sales Person living on full commission for 6 months before my MBA, because that was a Skill I wanted and maybe because at the age 21 you can afford to take the risk.

• What is Work Environment / Ambiance offering you: - This is particularly important for youngsters. The world around us is changing, there are a lot of Indian companies, which are changing, valuing performance instead of loyalty, having global ambitions etc. Yet there are a lot of companies who are still stuck in the protectionist economy morass. Another method of evaluation is looking at lifecycle of the Company and the Products it sells. If a company operates in a Mature or a declining market, it changes the whole worldview of the organization. The operations of these organizations would be tuned to maximizing returns in a mature or declining market through Cost Reductions- this always has cascading effect, Pay Packets, Promotions, Training Budgets or Publicity Budgets. At individual performance level, getting a 1% change in market share in a mature market is an extremely difficult job, so you may be actually struggling and putting in your best with minimal results, which can be very demoralizing. Also there are certain businesses or kinds of industries, which attract a particular kind of people. Although at the first instance you may not realize it, in the long term you realize a cultural dissonance. In such scenarios it would you to shift immediately, if you culturally do not fit in the organization, there are three things that may happen.

  1. You will never grow - because you would at a cultural level be an outsider.

  2. You change yourself to make yourself culturally acceptable to the organization and repent that decision.

  3. You would have morphed so much trying fit yourself to the culture that you become unfit for any other organization.

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* Vijay V. Bhat, an MBA from SCMHRD, Pune, having worked in Managerial positions in the Manufacturing sector, is currently working as a Consultant with a Hyderabad based IT company. The views expressed here are personal and do not represent his organization.