Bachelors Degree and Employability

Life is simple. We make it complicated through decision making based on insufficient/no information on the various subjects where we are supposed to take a stand.

Any decision making will have 5 essential elements:

1. Data
2. Information
3. Knowledge
4. Wisdom
5. Insight

Thought each may look different from each other, or the same, all the 5 points listed above are neither different nor the same. They are 5 levels of data and the extend to which it has assimilated with our understanding. Very interesting topic, and can be discussed in detail on another occasion.

Our academic life (based on current Indian education system) has 4 main junctions.

1. First day in school: Where he/she gets a total change of ecosystem. New friends, new life style, discipline, tasks, examinations, grading. There will be competition, one winner, and he/she will be prized based on the performance.
2. After 10th: First step towards specialization. For many students, full stop for Spoon-feeding & mugging-up. End of the era of 100% information feeding from classroom.
3. After 12th: Life of 80% information feeding from classroom, 20% from self-effort will end here. Most of you at some point of time already practiced self motivation, self direction, self discipline. You will be labelled under categories such as humanities/commerce/science. Not all students can pursue all the options of higher education. You understand this now. You will be proceeding for further specialization in your education and stepping towards professional education.
4. After Bachelor/UG degree: Ready to embrace the real world and real life outside text books and classrooms.

Our interest here is the 4th junction. And, how employability is related to it.

Lets understand ‘Employability’ as something which makes you employable. For this to happen, there must be an employment and an employer. Employment is your service to the service provider/employer, by you fulfilling the duty/role as ’employee’. Employability is your quality by which you become eligible to do the role of an employee.

We will discuss here five basic parameters that will help a fresh graduate acquire the skill of employability:

1. Patience:

One life quality that will separate dreamers from achievers, is patience. When you take up the job of providing service, there will be people above, below or to equal to your rank. You have to walk in balance mentoring those who are below your rank, and take guidance from those who are above your rank. And, with peers, those are the equals, your collegues, associate and collaborate with them for mutually beneficial results. Patience give you the ‘stamina’ or ‘resilience’ to keep trying and bringing the glowing result in your career.

2. Focus:

Focus is the power to concentrate on important matters of your life. This can be done by thinking clearly, prioritizing relevant matters to your life and career success, and unlearning distractions that are capable of deviating you from your path towards mission. Focusing brings clarity. After your bachelors degree, life as a job seeker, or on your first job with no past experience or exposure in any vocation , if anything you need the most as important as patience is, of course focus.

3. Determination:

Once you have the energy to undergo failures (patience) without loosing confidence, and know what to look for, and you identified distractions, you need that ‘thrust’ to cruise through your path, name it ‘determination’. ‘Yes, I can and I will do it!’, determination makes you say this. If someone toss the famous question, ‘Glass is half empty or half full, how you see it?’, a determined soul will answer it with ‘Does it really matter?’. If you are determined, that is the end game for all the side-talks and unnecessary drama in you career.

4. Proactive approach:

Self motivation and self direction sums up to proactive approach in one’s life. When self motivation brings a self propelling engine under your skin, self direction tells when and where to proceed. Both qualities when coupled in the best possible mechanism, sky is the only limit. Most of the youngsters after completing their bachelor degree pick up wrong role models in the society. Jobless youths, who invest most of his/her time in entertainments and bragging lack of any career opportunities and holes in existing education system, are more visible and have tremendous negative energy. One cannot blame if you are attracted to them automatically. On the contrary, you need more energy to stay away from these sources and put up yourself as examples of achievement through ‘Patience-Focus-Determination’ model explained just before. Proactive approach is needed for you to discover talents and skill hidden around your bones and to invent much bigger ‘career-defining-moments’.

5. SMART Goals:

In life we need objectives and/or aims. They are our aspirations, one word answer for the question that seeks meaning of our existence. Goals can be big or small. Goals can be achievable or unachievable. For a bachelor degree holder goal better be qualified through certain parameters. I would like to list out the SMART goals that can help you reach heights in your career.

1. Specific: Clarity in defining a goal in terms of its outcome, pursuing will make you confident.
2. Measurable: Ability to quantify and benchmark progress of reaching a goal is as important as that goals’ impact in our life.
3. Achievable: Rather than running behind a shooting star and wondering why you missed, it will make more sense for you to be following a butterfly and enjoying the pursuit. Chances are, in the latter case you may even reach with that fly and see what it does in its flight. In career too, try to set goals that are achievable.
4. Realistic: Goals if linked to reality, has a special attraction and meaning for the beholder. In case of a unrealistic goal, it will be called as hallucinations.
5. Timely: Timing is a very important parameter too. Anything you do or plan to do in your life, if it can be done with a timescale attached to it, will give you satisfaction and space for more life and career goals.

Towards the conclusion, lets understand bachelors degree as the recipe written in fresh white paper sheet, and employability is your ability to convert that recipe into a wonderful tasty dish for your life. Holding a recipe never guarantee you the wonder or fulfillment; ability to convert it to an actual dish does both or even more.