Tag: Work

CV Gaffes

Prasad Ajinkya12 Comments

We are hiring, and are screening resumes of different candidates for interviews. Some of the resumes that we came across are hilarious and I thought I might take the liberty of sharing it here (I am not disclosing the identity of the people, but if your CV does contain a line or two from these selected gems, then consider rewriting your resume!)

  • Seeking an environment to relish the constructive attitude and fulfill my appetite of success by facilitating the organization with my skills and abilities.
  • To use and enhance my educational as well as professional skills with dedications and commitment in the best possible way do as to acquire symmetric height for me and my organization.
  • To be an efficient part of a reputed organization and enhance my abilities while working to attain objectives of organization. I would like to work amongst Network of Skilled Professionals in a dynamic and highly demanding atmosphere.
  • Looking forward for a dynamic career in today’s challenging business environment Achieving organization objective as well as professional growth in an environment of co-operation of team spirit. Reach the top positioning my career and to attain the goal of life.
  • I want to have challenging career in growing organization, which gives opportunities to utilize the skills and contribute to rise up in the learning curve and which values professionalism, by demonstrating high energy levels, ethics and integrity.
  • To Pursue growth Oriented Career with a Progressive Company that provides scope to apply my knowledge & Skill which would also help me to Contribute my best to best Organization
  • To establish myself as a successful professional known for emerging victorious from challenging situations and completing given task thus helping company to new heights and fulfilling my dreams.

I do not understand why people keep career objectives in their resumes. Not only is it a waste of space, but also the recruiter does not glean anything (except maybe a chuckle or two) from it. Most of the objectives I have seen are bloated and filled with hot air – save the recruiter some trouble and directly cut to the chase.

Intensity of technology adoption

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

Everybody you know, will probably agree with this, that Technology can be a great enabler.

It’s one of those motherhood statements (like “Shit happens” or “Life sucks”) that arguably can’t be denied. As someone who has often taken upon himself to forge this enablement with the demands of the business, I want to take a different stand.

Technology CAN be an enabler, only if you possess the know-how of implementation and your audience possesses the temerity to bear the brunt of teething and adoption problems, then can it be an enabler. How many cases have we seen that an organization wide technology upgrade has failed simply because the intended audience does not adopt it, but merely reverts to the easily available alternative.

My mother heads the medical department of State Bank of India, she in fact is the Chief Medical Officer. She tells me that they had tried three times to implement some form of an enterprise system for their department, Each time it had failed. Why did it fail? Not because the implementation was incorrect. We can’t say that, the moment we do – the implementation partner will pull out the requirements sheet, the scope document or some form of agreement which indicates that there was no breach of contract from their side.

And that is the problem I want to point out. Technology is not a function which can run in a silo. It permeates through the organization, from the most mundane of activities like checking email, to most complex of them like implementing a Decision Support System to help the top brass in strategic decision making.

Technology adoption therefore has to be intense. So intense that it should change the identity of the organization. If done properly, it can vault the firm into the next level.

The next time someone tells me that technology CAN be a great enabler, I will tell them that if my aunt had a moustache, then she CAN be my uncle.

Batch of 2005

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IIM Indore

The world of business talks fondly of the batch of 1989 from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. This is due to the fact that a lot of participants in this class turned towards entrepreneurship and launched successful ventures of their own. The likes of Sanjeev Bhikchandani of Naukri.com, Rashesh Shah of Edelweiss Capital and many more.

Yesterday I was talking to some of my seniors, and suddenly there has been a tipping point in almost 30% of their careers. These 30% have left their well paying cushy jobs and started on the road to entrepreneurship. Some of them have already made a name for themselves, some of them are in the making.

I wish them all the best and hope that the batch of 2005, IIM-I is someday as famous (if not more) as the batch of 1989, IIM-A!

Concrete Ant-hills

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

Yes, you read that correctly. Today when I was coming to office, this thought struck me. Aren’t we all nowadays working in some commercial complex or the other?

Huge concrete towers where multiple corporates have their offices, and people moving in small “colleague huddles” from one place to the other? This is especially true in the cases of SMEs (small and medium enterprises), since they do not have enough capital to invest into a full blown facilities of their own.

So walk into any commercial complex and you will find hundreds of such firms humming with activity. With all the employees going about their day-to-day work … 10am tea break, 1pm lunch break, 5pm tea break … and so on. Aren’t these employees akin to worker ants then?

This tea break thing is a fascinating concept. I wonder if top managers know that tea breaks are the places where dissent is majorly expressed. They are the right places to tap into the corporate grapevine. An ex-colleague of mine used to do this by walking into offices incognito (since he was the CEO of the firm) and sitting inconspicuously in the canteen. Sooner or later some employees would come gossiping by and he would get his insight into the workings of that branch.

Hmmm … I wonder when this mode of working will evolve into a more individualistic nature?

Mastering a Mammoth

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

As part of my work, I am also maintaining the corporate blog these days. Sadly, the content management system (CMS) on which the blog is based on is kinda out of date. So much so that it has become virtually impossible to recreate the same environment on my own desktop.

What this means as a software person, I have to make changes and edits on a production platform. Not only does this give me the heeby jeebies, but also it makes the task a bit too tedious. Any one who has worked on an online server knows the PITA (pain-in-the-ass) it is to edit code files online.

Over the past week, I have been trying to handle this mammoth. I so miss my own agile and flexible WP 3.04 platform!!

In fact typing this blog has made me de-stress :-)

One of the great things about working with legacy CMS is that you get to (or rather have to) understand the exact workings of the CMS, you suddenly start seeing a plethora of possibilities and that gives you a sense of fulfillment.

Brand new day

Prasad Ajinkya11 Comments

I am not a job hopper (seriously, I do not switch jobs at a whim), but if you look at my resume, you will notice job hops every 2 years. First was eYantra Pvt Ltd, a start-up in Hyderabad, then Illumine Knowledge Resources Pvt Ltd and now I am joining Neev Knowledge Management as their Chief Technology Officer.

Reason for shifting

Making the decision to move on from Illumine was hard. The purpose for which the company worked was noble, and the fact that you are also working for such a cause was energizing. The pay was not bad as well (heck, it was great!!). The only difference was that there was an abject lack of achievable goals.

Yes, we did some cool stuff, but most of the times that never made it to the market. In fact there is a project that has been going for the past couple of years without seeing a long term market. Every time it goes to market, the feedback is used to change the very nature of the product itself … even the target segment. It takes a very dedicated team of individuals to sit through each cycle and look at the long term vision.

Going forward

At Neev, I hope to leverage my abilities as a techie manager to boost online sales and enable other initiatives through technology. Hoping to hone my skills as a web evangelist and to experiment some of my ideas. It’s a web firm, so I am back with unfettered net access :-), so I hope I will be able to keep a stream of posts and updates!

The world without Microsoft Office

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

In a discussion with a friend (and an ex-colleague), we were joking about work life in general (euphemism for mutual bitching). It seems that a lot of us are destined to work on Microsoft Office Powerpoint and Microsoft Office Excel almost all the time; be it a job in the sales team, the financial analyst team, the business analyst team … Microsoft Office never leaves us.

A shared fantasy was, what would happen to the world if Microsoft Office suddenly ceased to exist … the following are some pearls from that discussion … of course I have added some of my own, and welcome all of you to keep on adding to this list through the comments –

  1. MBAs would not have anything to do apart from sitting in meetings
  2. Corporations would realize how overly paid we all are
  3. The consulting industry would come to a virtual stand still
  4. People will actually work instead of creating documents
  5. Colleagues and teams will start talking to each other instead of exchanging documents and Track Change (Ctrl+Shift+E) reviews and Comments (Alt+R+C)
  6. Wikis and other collaborative groupware would be put to use … heck even Google Buzz might be exhumed
  7. B-schools will be forced to change their pedagogy or they will be virtually assignment-free … wheeee!!

… to be continued