Resume Building 2: Making your resume more effective than ever

The process of scouting for a job can be daunting for a fresher as well as an experienced candidate.

The process can be a long cycle of interactions between the aspirant and employer. Often, resume is the first step of interaction between these two parties. Obviously, the importance of having an effective resume cannot be undermined or taken lightly.

In my last post, I discussed on how candidates makes mistakes while making their resumes when they forget that they are not making a resume for self but for the employer. It is important to always keep in mind that the resume is the first point of impression which you create upon your prospective employer and what they say about “First impression being the last impression” does demand some respect

• Make your resume keeping in mind the employer
• It must be ensured that the resume looks like how the employer will want it to look. This can be done by doing a good research about the company, its requirements, what skills is it looking for and how can your achievements fit into their expectations. Obviously, it means that customizing your resume for different organizations or atleast for the similar types of organizations is advisable and can be fruitful
• 
  
• Write a resume not your autobiography

• As mentioned in previous post, a resume is different than a CV and unfortunately, both of them are very different than an autobiography. Having resumes which goes on beyond 2 pages is a taboo. Chances are that most of the employers will not even shortlist you. By asking for a resume the organizations as for a snapshot of your educational and professional background. The details are kept for the personal discussion and interview. Hence, a resume should be a clear, relevant and concise piece giving only the information that is asked by the organization.
• 
  
• Alignment between mentioned objective, your skills and organization’s requirements
• Ensure that the objective mentioned in the resume is well placed with your skills and company’ expectation. There should not be difference in what you express in objective and what comes out about you from your resume. Also, the objective should be in line with the organization is expecting from you as an employer.

• Highlight achievements and projects which are most relevant with respect to the job profile
• Make clear sections in the resume highlighting objective, educational background, professional background, work-experience, projects undertaken, extra-curricular achievements and other information which is relevant for the job application
• 
  
• Make your resume attractive aesthetically by using the right font and font size.

• Always use “Normal” or “Moderate” margin. Write the resume with a single font. Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana and Georgia are most common fonts used for professional resumes. The font size must be 10-12 pts for body of the resume. The headings can go upto 14 points. The name should have the largest font size on the resume but must not go beyond 16 pts. You can also consider highlighting certain points or keywords which you think are very relevant for the job application. This should not be overused though.

There are many more important tips which I will discuss with you on writing effective resumes in the coming posts. You can also check out some simple resume format for your reference on our share portal.Magister Share Portal

Resume Building 1: Build resume for the employer not for yourself!

What is the first point of interaction between a candidate and his/her prospective employer? - A Resume or a CV. Though I am not a believer of “first impression is the last impression” adage myself, I opine that first impression is of utmost importance be it for a job or a date. Which obviously means that you must as prepared and charged up for this first interaction for a job as you would be for your first date!

Type “Resumes/CV for Engineering/Management candidates” on google and you will have hundreds of sample resumes/cv and thousands of ways to write a good resume. I am not going to do that here. Instead, I want to use this post to focus on what does the employers seek in the resumes so as to shortlist some of them from its ever growing heap. What is of primary importance for a candidate is to be able to put together the information which will help his/her resume pass through the first barrier of resume filtering.

Primary differences between a resume and a curriculum vitae

However, I feel compelled to clarify something which has been confusing a lot of people lately. A Resume and a CV (curriculum vitae, which is Latin for “course of life”) are two different things. Refer the smart-art figure for differences. The difference not only lies in the very purpose why these are created but also in how they are created and what should be the content in each of the type.

After having gone through many interviews, blogs and articles from employers and their concerns to the extent of agony with respect to the quality and content of the resumes, I could jot down the following excerpt. It also points out what essentially they look for in the pile of resumes while short-listing them.

How to differentiate your resume from others

“…Most of the resumes are self-centric and not employer-centric.”

“…resume should be able to catch employer’s attention in its first 25%”

“…content in the resume must flow logically”

“…achievements are really subjective and not quantified”

“…Top three pointers employers look into a resume are – 1. Academic achievements

2. Projects/Internships 3. Extra-curricular activities”

“Top three skills looked upon (for a fresher’s resume) are – 1.Team player, 2.Problem solving 3. Communication”

As you would see most of the concerns are related to the quality of content of the resumes and not about the formats etc. Well, the reason of course could be that resumes with absolutely unacceptable formats are never even counted. However, it is safe to assume that with very little help and guidance from peers and teachers, students can put together a resume which is at least in an acceptable format.

As far as content is concerned, Employers feel that most of resumes look same to them. Worse, they look sadly same. The majority of resumes that employers receive are like replica of each other committing the same mistake again and again and again. The resumes look like they are shamefully boasting about themselves without being least bother, what the employer is looking for.

Employers feel that a resume must be able to communicate to the employers in clear, correct and unambiguous words, what the candidate brings to the table. This can be achieved by using simple english, recording measurable and quantifiable achievements and taking pain in putting down relevant information only (in terms of prior work and project experiences). It means a resume must be able to shout out loud “Let me help your company by employing my skills, experience and potential” instead of the cluttered phrase dominant in today’s job market “I am an engineer/MBA now, so please offer me this position”.

There is nothing like a wrong and a right resume. It there was, there will not be thousands of ways of writing them, just one right way to write it. There are however, good resumes and bad resumes. The first step towards making a good resume is to understand what the employer is looking for in the candidate and how can I make use of my skills, experience and personality to fit into that mould of employer’s expectation?

The bottom-line is - The resume must be made for the employer and not for you.

Once you are able to answer this question, you would have a clear understanding of what should go into your resume and how it must be customized for different employers.

In the next post we will take up some simple but taken-for-granted pointers to write a good resume.

Cheers,

Celebrities to Creative Directors - Hits and Misses

When Alicia Keys was asked about her role at Blackberry, her first act was to tell how much she loves BlackBerry.

What does it tell us about the role of a creative director in a serious company like Blackberry?

To me it looks like it’s an endorsement candy wrapped in a ‘serious-looking’ responsibility wrapper which has got printed “Creative Director” on it to make the candy offering more credible!

Ms. Alicia Keys went on to say that she’ll be working with app creators, designers and carriers to make sure BlackBerry is the most efficient phone out there. And how does she intend to do that? Nobody knows.It is hence unclear that how much she will bring to the company other than her celeb status. The same applies to Lady Gaga's role while she maintained that she has substantially contributed in the new product designs revealed by Polaroid some time back.

will.i.am(Black eyed peas) though, has been vehemently averring that his role, unlike his industry peers (err…old industry peers) is very different since he will be contributing during monthly brainstorming meetings at Intel headquarters along with his new industry peers, Intel engineers and coders.

What does all of this actually mean?

Does it really make sense to spend a fortune on these out-of-box ideas on toying around with designations that use to be serious once?

Some real creative directors that had adorned these designations before doesn’t seem to be happy with this new vogue. George Lois, who created "I want my MTV" campaign asks if these celebrities even understand what is the job all about? Simon Doonan, the longtime creative director of Barneys opines that these roles are more ambassadorial in function rather than technical or designatory.

But there has to be something for which these companies are scouting for creative directors from a historically unknown territory for them, entertainment industry. Following are some benefits that such tactics are expected to pay off –

• Improved, increased and expanded Brand reach and Identity 

• Access to a vast un-reached audience through celebrity relationship and network(Celebrity+Industry1+Industry2+Product) 

• Access to a huge number of fans and followers who instantly connect to the product or brand that the celebrity is so seriously involved with

• Higher celebrity involvement with the brand, makes its success or failure more important to the celebrity than what it would be if the celebrity was a limited tenured ambassador 

However, there seems to a fair number of problems as well in honking this horn.

• The company/product brand association may suffer if the celebrity brand takes a hit

• It is always a big gamble in terms of money and reputation invested into such arrangements 

• Chances of irking the real brains working on a concept, product or a brand by throwing away higher designations like this as part of marketing strategies 

• The consumer base or loyalists of company or product have a brand image about the same and bringing in a celebrity for a serious role might create negative impressions in terms of companies attitude towards its consumer segment as well as seriousness of its ethos and work-culture 

• Investors and consumers may look at these attempts as desperate measures to fill in for real good marketing tactics pointing toward weak business strategy

Where does this trend leads these companies to and how does it evolve further, we will have to wait and watch!

Cheers,

Celebrities to Creative Directors - A Marketing Gamble?

Let’s jot down what does it take to be a creative director of a company, or to make precise sense, a technology company. A creative director of a technology company must have an acute understanding of technology, not just the one which the company deals with, but what is around it.

A creative director has conceiving creative solutions, programs and applications, planning project scheduling and execution, recruiting the right team to do the job, managing and/or overseeing the project execution and bringing the project to completion as some of the most important items on his/her job description.

It makes the point clear that a creative director just not have to be “creative” to be adding value to his/her job and organization. A creative director must also be an excellent team leader having a keen sense of technology, be amazing at communication and have managerial skills to build a real house instead of imagining castles.

Alicia Keys - Creative Director, Blackberry

Do the recently anointed creative directors like Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, will.i.am, Justin Timberlake etc have it in them? No doubt they have been achievers in their fields of entertainment. No doubt that they have the passion of doing things what they like doing and doing it with the flair so as to be successful. But does being creative in their field make these ladies and gentlemen the right choice for a serious post like creative director for serious technology firms like Blackberry, Polaroid and Intel? We will have to wait for the answer.

It does make sense to mention here that inspite of all the efforts by these tech giants and their new directors to paint these affairs to be serious milestones, not many are taking them seriously. A majority of people take this pay-rolling of celebrities lightly calling it nothing but a marketing gimmick.Though this trend is not finding many serious takers in the technology industry, the sheer number of celebrities being welcomed into the executive list is alarming and hence cannot be ignored. However, if it is a serious business tactic or a tactless marketing maneuver, that remains to be established.

So why did it happen and continues to happen?

The problem surface from the use of the word ‘creativity’ (as in Creative Director or Director of creative innovation) which along with ‘innovation’ and ‘strategy’ is probably the most abused word in today’s world. It has always been a misconception that anything to do with art (singing, dancing, craft, painting etc) is a lifetime membership to the “i-am-creative” club.

will.i.am - Director of creative innovation, Intel

When this misconception is taken very seriously, the positions which were historically secured by professionals with exemplary qualification and experience starts getting adorned by celebrities who, in many cases, have a shallow or no understanding of the product, company or industry as such. Their creative credentials are deemed enough for them to sport a lanyard.

Victoria Beckham’s appointment as a Creative Director of Range Rover also baffles me in-spite of her claims of making serious contributions to the design ideas. Similar claims were also made by Lady Gaga while launching Polaroid products earlier. Will.i.am went on to say that he actually sits with coders and analysts and visits the Intel office every month for a meeting with his peers.

However, the question remains, does it really help the companies? The answer is yes and no.

I am sure you would be able to figure that out as well, We will take this in our next post anyways.

cheers,

Innovations and when do they start hurting…

This might sound very unusual to many, but had anyone ever thought about how innovation may hurt an organization or an industry altogether?

We are processed (yes, processed!) to accept and reject hypothesis laid and proved or rejected by studies, researches and cases in such an orderly and systemic way that we seldom think beyond the obvious.

Hence, it is almost a shock to listen and believe that –”…sometimes innovation hurts”.

Well, I call it self-hurting Innovation.

Before we demystify the title of this post, we put down an easy definition for innovation – Innovation in the simplest terms can be defined as a new and intelligent value addition in an existing product/category or develop a new product/category altogether which satisfies a customer’s need which was either unsatisfied or was never known to have existed before.

Let us take some examples to understand the above definition –

Innovation
Product-based	Touch functionality in mobile phones
Category-based	iPad by Apple
Cost-based	Chinese electronics products

Now, as we see none of these innovations hurt their organizations or categories, so how can an innovation actually turn self-hurting?

To get answer to this question we need to understand three types of innovations which organizations try to achieve.

• Defensive Innovation – This is a type of innovation which the organization seeks in order to defend its market share. These innovations does not lead to higher sales or loyalty neither they offer a path-breaking value additions to the customers. They are some minor tweaking in the existing offering to ensure that the product or service remains in the competitive race.Eg.-  Bringing out a diesel version of an existing petrol version automobile in a market with greater popularity of diesel versions automobiles.
• Aggressive Innovation – As the name suggests, these are the innovations which the company looks forward to in order to gain a substantial market share led by growth in sales volume and overall brand perception. These innovations offer excellent value-offering to the customers which are way ahead what the competitors are offering and hence aims at higher brand loyalty and market share against its competitors. Eg. -   iPod was ruthless with its competitors in developed markets due to its par excellent offerings.
•  Path-breaking Innovation – These are innovations which are not usually intended to be one. It means that they usually are accident! These innovations turn out to be huge success, almost always coming to as a surprise to the organizations and people around. These innovations not just lead but create new ways in the industry they are related to. Eg.-  Google search engine, started by Larry Page and Sergie Brin as a small step towards making search easy in a localized environment before turning into technological goliath and Facebook, kicked off in a dorm by Mark Zuckerberg with no clear headway and plan

Every organization must have a balance of projects aiming for defensive and aggressive innovations in its organization.

Problem starts brewing when the innovation becomes a necessity and more so when they turn into white elephants.When innovations become necessity organizations starts investing too much on them. Investments are made in conceptualization, research, design, production, marketing, sales etc etc and a product or a service which we refer as an innovation is born. Obviously, these investments takes shape of hopes and higher the investments are, higher the hopes weaved. These high hopes in turn further leads to investments into the new brand or product without much thinking on its potential and ROI. Since you want the higher investments to pay off well, you invest further more in an effort to leave no stone un-turned.

The end result is exorbitant amount of resources captivated by this new innovation. Sounds like recipe for disaster? Well, we have only started!

We know less than 5% of new products and brands are actually successful. The rest of them fall flat when the rubber meets the road. So what happens of the high hopes and even higher resources locked in this “innovation” which just bombed?  The company loses the opportunity to invest in other platforms where it might have earned success. Not just this, it also starts losing on strategic and operations fronts because of a failed innovation and its repercussions and in turn starts lagging with respect to its competitors.

In order to ensure that an innovation turns out to be what it is expected, following pointers must be kept in mind –

·         Strong leadership and a common vision for the organizational business units and domains

o    Ensures that everyone is aware of what is south as an organization and there is transparency and objectivity in decision making process across functions

·         Customer is first and foremost

o    No innovation attempt must be made without taking into account what are the customer needs and pain points and what does the innovation seek to address

·         Constructive and continuous feedback mechanism and multi-filtering processes

o    To ensure that no projects are taken forward as “pet projects” which leads to lack in objectivity and  usually tends to go unfiltered till finishing line due to emotional reasons

·         Strategic and realistic allocation of resources for projects undertaken by the organization

o    This allows the projects to have a boundary which they must respect and hence restricts extravagance and subjective approaches to completion

o    Allows right allocation to multiple projects and hence de-risking the overall project portfolio

These pointers are some generic rules which will help an organization to ensure that the innovations sought and aimed for, are not hurting it. Nothing is more dangerous than a self-hurting innovation for an organization, big or small.

So next time when you hear the word innovation, go deeper!

Cheers, 

Basics of Vendor Managed Inventory

Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (acronym CPFR) is an integrated approach which aims at achieving high degree of coordination and collaboration between vendor/manufacturer/supplier and customer/buyer. Essentially, it involves in itself various practices and techniques which allows for greater sharing and transparency between the two parties to achieve high degree of accuracy in planning (procurement, ordering, delivery), forecasting(based on historical sales, promotional and seasonal factors, inventory levels etc) and replenishment.

We further discuss one such technique which has gained its significance in leaps and bounds in past few years and has gone on to become one of the most important and successful technique in supply chain management domain. It is Vendor managed inventory or VMI.

Vendor managed inventory, simply put, is a system where the inventory of the customer or buyer is managed by its supplier or vendor. Sounds easy?

To understand what goes behind it and appreciate the complexity involved, we must decode the word ‘manage’ first. Manage here means –

• Taking an account of the customer’s inventory levels on a real-time basis
• This is achieved by employing technical innovations like Electronic data Interchange (EDI), Radio-frequency Identification(RFID), Extended Markup Language or XML etc
• Understanding the inventory requirements in future for the customer based upon number of factors like –
• Product related - product demand, promotions etc
• Macro factors - market situation, competitive scenario, demand-supply balancing etc
• Taking into consideration historical information on product and category sales
• Creating replenishment orders for the customers and stocking it at the right place at the right tim
• The stock can also be delivered as consignment inventory which means that only the physical ownership of the stock is transferred to the consignee(one who has received the stock) while the title remains with the consignor(one who has sent the stock)

The below figure will make the interactions between the parties more clear.

Hence putting the above diagram in simple steps, we demystify the VMI as follows –

1. Customer shares information related to his sales, stock available on individual sku level in real-time mode
2. The vendor received this information and uses it as an input along with other information he receives like promotions running on any particular product or categories, historical sales of the given categories and products and other macro-influencers
3. This information is then processed to achieve a forecast which is more accurate and robust than the traditional methods of forecasting
4. This allows supplier or vendor to create a replenishment order for the customer
5. The details are shared with the customer for him to acknowledge the order and prepare himself for the delivery
6. Supplier or vendor replenishes the stock at the given stock station or warehouse
7. Advice is generated and depending on the types of stock (consignment or not) the billing is executed for the customer

VMI hence provides host of benefits to either parties.

If you are a customer involved with a VMI model , you have following advantages –

• Reduction in stock-outs as well as inventory levels(and hence attached costs!)
• Significant reduction in planning and ordering costs(since they are now taken care of by vendor)
• Improved service levels for their customers due availability of the right item at the right time in right the quantity
• Allows the customer to focus on core operation due to freed-up time and investments

*(Think on what could be the disadvantages of employing VMI as a customer)

As a supplier, VMI is beneficial in a number of ways like 

• Visibility of the POS data for customer gives you a better understanding of what is selling and what is not
• Reduction in errors in ordering due to manual reasons and intentional mistakes (panic ordering etc)
• Higher degree of accuracy in forecasts for the customer demand as well as overall demand
• Allows the vendor to build an environment of trust and hence ensure a long-term partnership with its customers

*(Think on what could be the disadvantages of employing VMI as a vendor)

To work on VMI though, certain very basic ground rules must be set as prerequisite. They are –

•              An environment of trust must be fostered between vendor and customer (data sharing is required)
•        Both the parties must be on similar technological platform (to ensure greater synergy & integration)
•        Commitment from higher management and stakeholder (It takes some time for benefits to be seen)

     **Read on how Walmart and P&G entered into a VMI agreement leading to multiple benefits for both the partners.

 Cheers,

What we all must know about Cloud Computing

University of California at Berkeley, defines cloud computing as – “….the applications that are delivered as services over internet as well as the software and hardware systems at data centers that enables the delivery of these services”


These services can vary from –

• Tapping various software applications and platforms related requirements
• Saves time, efforts, costs and mitigates risk
• Allowing integrated data-housing capabilities across geographies
• Helps in greater synergy across locations coupled with information synchronization
• Data mining capabilities for vast data aggregated in multi-layered format
• Data analysis helping in strategic decision making

As evident these services (and many more) can be catered to a large number of customers which falls under various industrial and functional domains.

Cloud was initially dubbed as the next big thing in IT/ITes only and hence it was majorly propagated by the avant-gardes of IT services. However, the world has now come to the realization that cloud is much more than what everyone expected it to be, another IT Innovation.

The below figure tries to visualize the above explanation –

As shown above, these industries (and a lot of others) can benefit from cloud computing. We now look closely at the benefits of cloud computing as a multi-facet technology.

IT is an inherent part of any organization these days and hence expenses on IT is inevitable. Further, IT is considered to be a cost-center in organizations and hence the aim is always to minimize the cost involved without affecting the quality and operational aspects. Cloud essentially helps organizations in doing that. It allows organizations to –

• Block less assets on IT infrastructure (And hence free up the capital for core operations)
• Spend less(or nothing!) on maintenance of these assets
• Save more on human capital spent on the IT functions
• Avoid the hassle of upgrading systems due to new technologies

Apart from these direct and most obvious benefits once draws from cloud computing there are other much obscure and inter-related benefits that can be derived from cloud computing. Some or most of these advantages are looked upon as drivers for macro-level business strategic decisions and processes.

• More, easier and cheaper collaboration of partners and teams across geographies leads to accelerated rate at which a company creates new services and products
• An edge over competitors and better consumer behaviour understanding through data mining capabilities
• Creating an environment for achieving excellence in core-operations and innovation due to better handling of support functions like IT and IT infrastructure
• It also allows smaller organizations to have a much needed helping hand to kick-off and perform and hence builds a roadway for large number of start-ups to come into play

However, all of this is not without its own share of doubts and concerns. There are few who disregards and others who distrust the capabilities and significance of cloud computing. There are of course several reasons which invokes concern about this technology and some of them do need contingency and mitigation plans to work with. We try to entail few of such concerns which have constantly been raised about cloud computing.

• Data Security – How secure is the data with the vendor?
• Data Privacy – Will the data held within the vendor’s infrastructure (hosting cloud which may or may not be public) be kept private?
• Cloud vendor-switch (vendor lock-in) flexibility – How will the switching between vendors be?
• Regulations and compliance – Whether cloud vendors will be able to satisfy government and agencies led regulations and compliance policies? Are these regulation and compliance are strict enough to ensure that there are no leakages, loss and privacy issues?
• Data Lineage – There is another set of people who are sceptic about the data lineage (Data lineage is the phenomenon of receiving exactly the same data which was once fed into the system
• Loss of control over IT operations -  Though it is cited as a major benefit, few organization looks upon cloud computing as service which takes away the control from the parent organization and hence renders away with important decision making in that context

In-spite of the odds mentioned above which cloud computing must fight for its credibility and survival, the statement that cloud computing is here to stay, is no exaggeration. The advantages though seriously outweighs the disadvantages, certain steps must be taken in order to smooth-en the future of cloud computing –

• IT industry must demonstrate the strength and capabilities of cloud computing to its prospective user community and how the issues highlighted related to privacy, security and vendor lock-in can be addressed
• Government, in collaboration with prospective user community and cloud providers, must create a policy document which entails the regulations and compliances that must be fulfilled before the services can be requested or provided by either party
• Regular meetings must be scheduled by the responsible bodies in order to ensure that the bottlenecks be treated as soon as possible
• Further innovation must be encouraged by the government and IT industry keeping in mind evolving needs of customers

Cheers,

What is MOOC?

A disruptive innovation of a sort which few patrons as the new wonder kid on the education block while others dismiss it as a momentary transaction, bound to die down its own death –

It is fondly called MOOC.

Massive Open Online Courses, as they are termed and abbreviated as MOOCs are, simply put, online courses which follow certain criteria –

• Free of cost
• Open access to everyone
•  Aimed at bigger virtual classroom

MOOC can be understood as an innovative and technology driven form of distance education.

Students can take these courses while they are sitting in their homes or cyber cafés or schools through an interactive online platform. Courses ranges from the ones designed for middle-school to high-school and to even graduates in various streams like maths, science, social science etc.

Completion of these courses does not warrants for an academic degree, however, these courses most likely offer certificates of commencements and excellence to the enrolled students who have completed all formalities associated with these courses.

The courses for MOOCs are designed in such a way that they deliver lectures in short, interactive video clips that allow students to progress at their own pace through course materials. They also offer live quizzes with instant feedback.

The term MOOC was first coined by Dave Cormier who is Manager of Web Communication and Innovations at the University of Prince Edward Island.

MOOCs are very helpful for students who cannot enrol in a formal education system, majorly due to expensive efforts, for those who want an extra help in their studies and for those who want to learn things in a more creative way.

However, there has been some major criticisms of MOOCs also –

• ·         Half-baked sustainability model
• ·         Missing peer-to-peer communication and learning
• ·         Very low course completion rate with respect to enrollment rate.

o   For Example, In a course taken up by a teacher on an online platform garnered 53,205 students while only about 4.8% of the total strength could complete the course

This point to a number of flaws in the model as mentioned in point one.

Since the cost to a MOOC is zero and commitment level in the students is not checked or gauged at the time of enrollment, there are a lot of insincere students who sign up for the course without being sure of taking it.

However, many points that the online discussion among the student committee is usually more knowledge-ful than the ‘package’ lectures.

Having mentioned some of the demerits of MOOC, it still is a fair judgement that the idea is innovative and sustainable. There is extensive work which is being done in this field and the future looks bright for MOOC community and education system.

Please refer to following MOOC based sites for more information–

https://www.edx.org/

https://www.khanacademy.org/about

https://www.coursera.org/about

Cheers,