Written by Sameer Kamat

It’s only a matter of time before working men and women will start facing the heat of a mid-life career crisis in their job. It’s seldom an overnight development that you can quickly put your finger on. Instead it starts creeping up slowly but surely. Office politics, burnout, ego clashes, loss of management trust, self defeating feelings of self-doubt.

Listening to the frustration release song (can you guess who’s the singer?) can offer a few moments of solace, but no real solution. For many, a job change or an international MBA seems like a good escape route to reset the clock and start off afresh. But it’s an expensive & risky option and there’s no guarantee that the mid-life career problems you were facing will disappear. What if they resurface in the new company in a different form?

Written by Sameer Kamat

Learning German, French, Spanish, Japanese or any other language can give you an advantage that no technical or managerial skills can replace. The ability to connect and interact with colleagues, clients and friends from another culture is a huge ice-breaker.
After completing my MBA, I worked for a German company (in India) for 5 years. This involved frequent trips to Germany. So in the first few months after I joined, I spent several hours each day to learn basic German from Anjali Patil, a highly accomplished German teacher from the Goethe Institut.
She has been one of the most patient teachers I’ve ever come across. It’s tough to manage a bunch of over-grown brats in the corporate class, but Anjali did it with poise and elegance. The end result was, after the course, we were able to manage not only our Germany trips well, but also the numerous email chains that would often shuttle between English and German content.

Written by Sameer Kamat

Academic jobs in business pay well, in fact, much better than ‘regular’ academic jobs in other (non-business) fields. But it’s a tough and long road to get there.
IMD Switzerland MBA grad Hari Raghavachari wraps up the 2-part series on academic careers by talking about how you get get the skills and qualifications needed for academic jobs.

Written by Sameer Kamat

Academic jobs are usually associated with teaching and research. Beyond this, the level of awareness is limited, specially for those seeking a ‘business focussed’ career.
Hari Raghavachari (an IMD Switzerland MBA alumnus) thinks there’s more to academic careers than meets the eye. In this 2-part series, he tries to provide additional insights into the world of teaching, administration, consulting and research jobs, but with a business focus.

Written by Sameer Kamat

Combining business networking with technical and managerial skills can ensure that your ascent in the corporate world continues unabated.
Ipseeta Aruni, has been sharing insights with us in a 3-part series on building and sustaining business relationships. Her other posts are as follows:

Post 1: How to network and build relationships for corporate success.
Post 2: Business networking tips: Take the relationship to the next level
Here’s the final post

Written by Sameer Kamat

Business networking in the corporate world is an important skill to pick up, if you want to go beyond your technical roots.
Ipseeta Aruni, an Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee graduate, started a series on soft skills in business. In the first post she wrote about how to network and build relationships for corporate success. Read that first to know who Mr. EasyConnect and Mr. PureBiz are. The second one in the series takes it to the next level.

Written by Sameer Kamat

If you learn how to build and nurture relationships in the corporate world, you can get a lot accomplished that your purely technically focussed colleagues would never be able to match. Get this apsect right and it’ll be worth more than all the technical skills you’ve picked up in your undergrad and MBA classrooms.
Ipseeta Aruni is a graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee with a keen interest in the arena of soft skills in business. If you stare hard enough, you might also see a highly talented hip-hop dancer who can amaze you with her electrifying moves on the dance floor. For now, she shares a few easier corporate moves that you could practice in your career and take it on accelerated growth path. This is the first of a series that she’ll be writing on the topic of building, sustaining and leveraging business networks.

Written by Sameer Kamat

What’s the best way to form a great first impression on an influential decision maker? Create an impactful curriculum vitae (CV). This applies to almost all situations where a resume will be used as one of the tools to filter a huge list of candidates. Whether you are creating an MBA resume format for Bschool applications or creating a CV for internships or jobs, there are a few basic things you can keep in mind to maximise the impact.

Let’s cover that in 3 stages: First we look at the process that a majority of applicants generally follow, then we change perspectives and look at the process that a reviewer is likely to follow. Once we have contrasted the two, the disconnect is easier to locate. Based on that you’d know what you should or should not be doing when you are creating your resume.

Written by Sameer Kamat

The last few years haven’t been kind. Most good and capable professionals in eviable pre MBA jobs had to face the heat of an economy that went spiralling out of control, in the wrong direction. Companies felt the easiest way to deal with it was to cut costs, and employees were easy targets. So much for the ‘Our employees are our biggest assets’ spiel.

A whole lot of guys who got the short end of the stick didn’t know how to deal with the unexpected change of events.

Written by Sameer Kamat

Each of these options fall in the ‘tremendously important’ category for us. And unfortunately for a whole lot of Indian candidates, all 3 seem to collide at the most inappropriate time. The average age for the top MBA programs is around 26-27. And that’s when most Indians start thinking about marriage and (ahem) settling down. But there’s also that keeda gnawing in the background about getting a massst international degree before (sorry again) settling down. And to add to the confusion, this is also the time when their careers are just on the verge of taking off. Management roles start beckoning after having put in several years of grunge work. So what do you do?