7 Sept 2016

Beyond classrooms

Like any recruitment professionals, I’ve interacted with thousands of fresher candidates and I’ve seen one thing in common amongst almost all the freshers who have done part-time job during their education, be it under-graduation or MBAs or any degree for that matter.

Unlike others, they carry good amount of maturity and balance.  They are realistic in their expectation. They are grounded and they carry themselves much better than most the other freshers. They seem to know the value of money and job.  They seem to take rejection much better than most of the other freshers.

In my experience, of many HR interns that I’ve seen, Interns with part-time job experience during their MBA were much different. They show lot of seriousness and accountability in doing a job and they don’t carry themselves as a student. For a moment, you could mistake them for your regular employees. Campus to Corporate transition has already taken place for them and they are for real.  BTW, when I say part-time job, I don’t mean internship. I mean the real job wherein you get to take up real time work and you are accountable for that.

So what is so special about them and what do they learn from their part-time job that they don’t get to learn in MBAs?

I think they come out of their protected and pampered environment and get to face and experience the real world. When the “real world” becomes your school, the lessons are real-time and life lessons.

In this Blog posting, I just thought of sharing couple of examples that I’ve come across.

1. Billionaire’s MBA son in India sent to do odd jobs for a month

I’ve recently come across a News update wherein a Gujarat-based Billionaire dad decides to teach his son doing MBA a real world experience. He persuades his son to go and survive in an unknown place for a month with certain conditions as given below

# He should not disclose his identity.

# He should try to get a job, earn money and survive on his own for a month. He should not work in any place for more than a week.

# He will be given Rs.7000/- but he should spend it only in case of emergency, not for day to day expenditure.

Though it sounds unrealistic or like a movie, it did really happen in Gujarat.
His son accepts the challenge and goes to Kerala to realize many things about the real world.  He could not get any job for about 5 days. No place to stay.  After lot of struggle, he would find jobs in few places and mostly odd jobs.  However, the lesson learnt, according to him, were many life lessons that he did not learnt / would not have learnt in his MBA.

This life skill lesson in real world was planned by a Gujarati based diamond merchant of Rs.6,000 Cr company.

Mr. President’s daughter taking up restaurant job in the US

You would have come across this news that Obama sent his youngest daughter to work in a restaurant.  Can you imagine the daughter of most powerful person in the world taking up a job in a restaurant? I guess, the lessons meant were - To be a grounded person in life, to understand and respect the other people, to understand the value of money etc.,

Points to ponder

# What the class room cannot teach, a real world will teach us:

If you are interested to know what it means to face the real world and want to come out of your pampered /protected world, do get into some kind of part-time job.

If you want to become a recruitment professional, do take up a part-time job in any head hunting agency. Just reading about recruitment and case studies on Books will not help much.  If you want to know what customer care is all about, do take up a part time wherein you get to interact with customers directly. You will have hands-on experience on all about customers and how to handle them.

If you look at some of the most successful people in the world, they were not necessarily formally educated which only confirm the learning potential that lies outside the typical classrooms. Example – Thomas A Edison


So there are many things beyond class rooms that could complement and enhance your studies.  Are you ready to explore that?

diD yOU enJOY ReADinG ThIS ArTIcLE? 
                                  If yES, 
yOU maY sHAre it wiTH Your FriENds tOO 

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