Do you know your challenges? Blog Post 7

Having done really well in the first round of interview, aptitude test, group discussions, technical round - you are finally hired.

No doubt you are on cloud nine after winning a job and feel accomplished. But hold on there, it is only a beginning. You are now stepping out from your protective shell into a world where you will find no one other than yourself fighting against different circumstances.

What do I mean by ‘fighting against different circumstances'?

With all the array of subject a student learns as part of the academics, not all will know which career path to choose. A commerce student or a history student may end up as a software engineer and a computer engineering student may end up as a lab technician. The challenge here is to have a clear vision. No one else can have a clear vision for your career other than you yourself. If you take for example software engineering jobs, there are scores of jobs you can pick from within this field - QA analyst/programmer/database analyst, database administrators/software architect/network engineer etc. etc. Unfortunately not every graduate even realizes the various options available. Often, graduates do not even have an opportunity to make the right choice.

Therefore, even if you have won a job for yourself, you may not be sure if you have made the right choice.

When you start spending few months/years in your organization, you will slowly realise that there are many other better opportunities, many directions in which you can steer your career. A lot of people realise this quite late in their career and regret for making the wrong choices. Of course, it is too late by then.

You will slowly find yourself surrounded with dirty office politics where a not so worthy candidate easily walks up the corporate ladder than a very hard working/smart working candidate. The enthusiasm/zeal you had on the first day of joining your first job starts to fade away and what remains is your frustration, struggles and fear of failure.

This is when you realise that apart from the academics scores there are many other skills required to sustain yourself in the corporate world.

What are those skills? 

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