The year 2011 is already one month old. But, it is never too late to take good advice.

Note that this article was written targeting fresh graduates looking for jobs.

Try to follow most of the bullet points given below

• You shall not lose hope, no matter how many interviews you fail
• You shall spend more time on your resume to bring it to decent shape
• You shall get in touch with all your contacts, relations and friends who work in the industry that you are aspiring a job for
• You shall forward your resume to your seniors and request them to refer to companies
• You shall spend time knowing yourself, strengths and especially weaknesses
• You shall feel happy about your unique strengths
• You shall work hard to overcome your weaknesses
• You shall spend more time in recreational activities like sports, reading, community service
• You shall spend lesser time on activities that add no value, such as watching TV/movies, listening to music, wandering on streets with no purpose, gossipping about movie stars
• You shall not aimlessly browse facebook or youtube or internet in general
• You shall not spend time in downloading nonsense using torrents
• You shall not discuss with friends about depressing topics like who has got the best salary package or who has got the best job yet
• You shall take career decisions based on your interest in the subject matter
• You shall not take career decisions solely based on the salary offered
• You shall not compare yourself with your friends or relatives
• You shall focus on specific technologies and not get tempted to learn whatever is trending
• You shall not take unsolicited career advices from relatives or friends, who infinitely lecture about career decisions (especially those that don’t have first hand experience in what they are advising about)
• You shall not spread discouragement or pessimism to your peers

Good luck for job search!

Once there lived a grasshopper in a meadow. Everything was green and the scene was very lovely. The grasshopper was very fond of dancing and singing. He danced and sang at all times. He had nothing to do. He did not think that there was anything else worth doing at all.

He never cared to do any work while it was time to work. He kept singing and dancing throughout the spring and the summer.

When winter came, it began to snow. It was snow everywhere. There was snow on hills and snow on plains. No flower or leaf was visible. The once-happy grasshopper was now very unhappy. He had nothing to eat. He felt very miserable. He looked for his friends to help him in his time of trouble.

The grasshopper went to his friend, the ant. The grasshopper said to the ant, “Please give me something to eat. I am dying of hunger at the moment. You alone can help me in my hour of need.”?

The ant said to him, “We ants work hard during summer. We store food for winter. But what were you doing during summer?”

The grasshopper replied, “I sang through summer, the time was so happy. Everything was beautiful and lovely.”

The ant was angry and said to him, “Then you should dance winter away as well.”

———————————————————————————-

Can you relate to this story?

When you join a college, everything looks beautiful and lovely. We have new friends, new world, new life.

Due to our natural urge for enjoyment, we waste time partying, watching movies, playing computer games, wandering aimlessly around the town, trekking, watching TV, picnicking and hanging around with friends, gossiping and having fun.

Like the grasshopper, we don’t see any immediate need for doing anything else at all. We mock at people like the wise ants to get a life. Wise students invest their time in scoring better marks, bettering their technical skills, learning foreign languages, improving their written and spoken communication, participating in events that add value to resume.

The first two and half years of engineering are like Spring and Summer. Everything will look rosy and comfortable. The last two years of college are like Winter and Autumn.

Once on-campus placements start in third year, we start feeling uncomfortable. It feels very painful to know that we don’t qualify for a campus placement interview due to poor grades or due to backlogs in college. It feels like chilling winter, when others secure jobs well ahead of graduation from college, while we don’t manage to impress the interviewer in the job interview.

As a reaction to our failures, we stop partying, and start grieving. We start losing our self confidence and stop believing in ourselves. This makes the tough task of getting a job look tougher. Job search becomes a depressing task.

Avoid all this. Learn from the wise ant and lazy grasshopper. Don’t waste your time in enjoyment. Balance your fun activities with useful and recreational activities that benefit your job search activity.

Are you an ant or a grasshopper?

Srimannarayana Karthik, a 25 year old Indian International student of University of Southern California is a role model for all upcoming engineers. He didn’t compromise his dream of getting a CORE job for anything else in this world. He pursued his love for VLSI (Very-Large-Scale-Integration) designing and recently joined Intel as a Design Engineer.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Karthik. Young engineers who are on crossroads wondering which way to go shall benefit from this!

Tell us why did you choose the Electrical Engineering in Bachelors?

I had a simple reason to choose this line. I joined Electrical because everyone said it was tough and I wanted to take the challenge! Basically, I had to choose between Computer Science and Electrical. I knew that I’ll anyway learn computer languages irrespective of the fact that someone teaches me or not. Also I figured out that i can come back to CSE if I wanted to even after I did EEE, but not vice versa. So I joined EEE branch in Sathyabama University, Chennai.

How did you fall in love with VLSI?

In my B.Tech college days, I always wanted to build an autonomous machine and one fine morning there was this advertisement from ALTERA, the chip design company, regarding the same on the department notice board. I proposed my idea to them and it got accepted. I got funding and my design was selected among top 15 designs in India! I made a presentation in Bangalore. I didn’t win the contest, but this incident raised my interest towards VLSI. Later, I participated in NIOS Design Contest and made it to the final round. Then I attended a VLSI conference in Hyderabad. This is where I met a bunch of professors and corporate people, and realized the advances of electronics and which way it was heading. Since then I wanted pursue my career in it.

Was there any specific reason why you did Masters in Electrical Engineering?

Like half of the people I know even I was an IIT aspirant and like majority of them, I failed to get into IITs! After my Bachelors, I got an opportunity to be a Research Assistant for a professor at IIT Mumbai. I stayed there for a week. I noticed that even in IITs there are very few chances to reach the pinnacle in any core field. Moreover, everyone there looks forward to get a job in banking or finance which would give them a salary of 12 lakhs per annum. No one was really that passionate about their specialization. I felt that no one in India does design even in the big companies like Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD. They do testing or support work. I wanted to do design to the core. The best option that I saw was to do my MS in the field I like and work in the field that I love and where the actual designing is done!!

How was your stay in the University of Southern California during your Masters Program?

I would put my USC life as the most interesting phase of my life. For many reasons, I would rate my course (in VLSI) one of the best in world for sure. The course dealt with bottom to top approach. Right from how a Silicon is used to fabricate to building processor based system. I didn’t just learn them, I practically built them too!

I cursed my college every night for the amount of work that they gave to do me. But, every time I felt like finishing it properly and learning something new out of it and not just doing it for namesake. At the end of the day, I constantly felt that I learned something new and achieved something. I used to study about 14 hours a day. As a matter of fact, we never needed to memorize anything, because we were allowed to carry the required book to the exam! You can only pass a course if you can figure out the solution to the problem. There are no question banks, no predetermined set of questions! I wouldn’t say that all courses and universities are the same. But if you want to learn, Masters in the USA is definitely a viable option. You can complete your degree by taking easy courses or you can take up the challenge by choosing tough courses. Unlike in India, the courses are not mandatory. So you’ll do it only if you want to learn and hence all my courses were of my interest and were challenging!

One more thing that I would like to add is that every time I paid fees in B.Tech, I used to feel that the college was stealing money from me. But during my MS, even though I paid much more than B.Tech, I felt that I got value for my money!

What qualities should an electrical engineer have?

In order to be a good Electrical Engineer, you need to be passionate and hardworking. In fact, many companies in the USA are trying to export parts of VLSI design to India. One insider for you — 80% of people working in technical jobs in US doing highest level of design work is either Indians or Chinese!

Just be passionate and start working towards it. Never stop your learning once you come out of college. There are so many things to do around. Many design contests, lots of funding. Just browse around and try to do something on your own apart from what you have to do for college or for marks. You will automatically end up in a good job and feel much better at the end of the day and feel satisfied for the thing you learnt on your own.

Tell us something about your job at Intel?

I am really excited. In fact, super excited!! My position is of a Graphics Hardware Engineer and I am entering a team that is about to start a new graphics architecture. It will come to market after a couple of years. So I am working on something that the world is unknown of!!

My part is basically physical design. To tell a little bit about it, you write a code and fix bugs. This is front end. In back end you take this debugged code and do all the necessary steps to make it to silicon. I’ll be working in the back end.

Describe your interview with Intel?

The interview is mostly technical with about just about two minutes of intro about the team and position. The Manager contacted me about the position and after that a telephonic interview was scheduled. Someone from his team then called me up and asked a few questions based upon my resume and their requirements. I actually did well in my telephonic interview and based on my performance, I was called for the on-site interview.

The job requirement was for both front-end and back-end design engineer. The on-site interview was very grilling. One full day of interview for about 5-6 rounds with different team members in different fields and each one of them at-least 1 hour long. There was one lunch where you get to meet the team and socialize with them. I was interviewed on Friday, so they offered me to stay there over the weekend and get to know the location also. They said that they will get back to me on Monday.

Interviews are tough. They interviewer wants to see what is your breaking point. They will look the way you approach an issue, were you able to solve it if helped and trust me they are very friendly. They want to know how much you know and not how much you don’t know!!

Describe your job search strategy in detail?

In the US, the ratio of success to application is lesser than 1%, which means if you apply for hundred positions, only one manager would look at your resume!! Understand this, digest it and plan accordingly.

I finished up most of my hard course in first 3 semesters and did only one course in final semester so that i can completely dedicate my time for job search. Make sure that you keep applying jobs as many as you can. I mean writing a cover letter for each position separately, and modifying your resume for different positions. Making a good resume is long process and I don’t want to get into that. Just keep it latest and updated. The job search here is so screened. They won’t hire you if they need someone, they’ll hire if they find someone good enough for their requirement!!

Resume gets searched for keywords by softwares and by the Hiring Managers based on the requirements given by Technical Manager. So they have no idea how good you are if your resume is not picked up by their software! The manager then takes a look at your resume and if he likes, he will talk to his team and decide to have interview to support someone for some responsibilities. Then he’ll get back to you. So you need to do your ground work. Look what a specific company is looking for and what your strengths are and then apply to them properly. I used to apply for only 5-10 jobs/day and it took me about 2-3 hrs/day. In one instance when a manager contacted me, I tried to find him on LinkedIn and see what his specialization is, where he studied and stuff like that. Based on that you know how he will approach an interview.

I used to be honest in interviews. If I couldn’t answer a question, I would always ask the answer directly to the interviewer and would try to find out more about it. This helped me a lot. This way I learnt so much in interviews more than one can learn in college. Also this shows the manager that you are interested in learning.

At the end of the day, you need a bit of luck. Good luck!

If you want to get in touch with Srimannarayana Karthik, you can contact him on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/srimank

Chances of you getting an interview call

Take this quiz to know the probability of you getting a Job call from an IT company in next one month. Click on Start Quiz link below.

Share this article with your friends if you find it useful.

This article has been written to inspire Engineers who passed out of college this Summer and are still looking for a job.

Warning: Please stop reading this article if you are a non-believer of universality of God or if you hold negative feelings against Hinduism.

I know this is very strange – an article that claims to apply philosophy of Bhagawath Gita to help freshers get a job. But believe me, this single article could turn your life around. All I ask you is to understand and apply the principles explained below with an open mind.

For the past few weeks, I have been reading The Gita, ancient book which is believed to be over 5000 year old. Strangely, I had found many tips that are relevant to the current job market scenario.

Without further ado, let’s see how we can use the concepts of Karma Yoga prescribed in The Gita.

Here are 5 principles of Karma Yoga:

1. Treat your actions as a mere responsibility, do not get attached.
2. Never start any work with a desire of material output.
3. Regardless of success or failure in your work, don’t give up.
4. Don’t be happy when you succeed. Don’t be sad when you fail. Be stoic.
5. While working, keep your senses, heart and mind in control.

Read all the statements above twice and try to understand what they mean.

As a part of your job search you might have applied to companies, uploaded your resume to job websites, subscribed to job search blogs like Interview Mantra, contacted your relatives, approached an astrologer for prediction of job success, etc. It is likely that you got tired of searching for jobs.

You keep asking yourself questions like, Why are you being treated unfairly by god, How did your friend who secured less score in college got a job before you, Why don’t you get an interview call despite of months of job search. You might be feeling distressed and dejected. These feelings cause a negative impact on your job search.

Because you are feeling bad, you stop applying to companies, you stop asking seniors for help for the fear of humiliation, you stop taking the preliminary tests in companies out of diffidence. The result of this obvious, your job search is further delayed.

Just imagine, how would it have been if you start to treat your job search as a mere duty without any attachment to the process searching for jobs (see principle 1 above). You will never feel distressed again as you know that you are regularly doing your duties such as uploading your resume to company websites, following job forums and applying for jobs.

Now, tell me something. Why do you want a job after your education?

The answer varies from person to person. For some, they have responsibilities towards their family. Few want a job to earn a living. Few would like to work because of the inherent nature of humans. Like an ancient Indian quote says “Udhyogam Purusha Lakshanam”. Few people search for jobs because their peers are doing the same.

So, you are expecting the fruit of time you spent for job search. Start applying principle (2) — never start a work with an expectation as a result of your efforts. I’m not telling you to stop searching for jobs. I’m telling you to minimize and zero down your expectations from searching for jobs. Think that searching for job was a duty assigned by someone to you. You are expected to do your duty sincerely.

Commonly, freshers get disheartened when the job that get falls short of their expectation. If your expectation is zero, anything you get in return for your activity is a bonus. You will never feel bad again.

Do you get a feeling that you are a loser? Don’t feel bad, this is a natural feeling that students get when they fail in job interviews. People around you, including your parents start comparing with peers. This world expects us to be infallible like Rajinikanth.

Everyone around you pressurizes you indirectly to maintain a success to failure rate equal to 100 to 0. That’s when you start feeling the pressure, a virtual weight on your head that resists your work. Under pressure, you fail to give your best performance at interviews. The fear of failure acts detrimentally causing further failure.

If you start adopting principle (3) — treating success and failure in the same way, you would never stop at a failure. More importantly if you are not scared of failure, you will be fearless. When you are fearless, you give your best performance. Enjoying success is not a good idea, as it raises the standards of your mind to a higher level. Every time you fail to reach that level, you would feel hurt.

Did you know, Thomas A. Edison failed 1000 times before inventing Electric Bulb. If Edison gave up after failing a couple of times, we would not have probably been using the bulb now.

There is quotation that goes “Nothing fails as success”. The more success you get, the more relaxed you become. Consequently, the greater are your chances of failure. So, enjoying the fruits of success is not a great idea in a long term.

Similarly, feeling bad for a failure is also not right. If failures at a job interview weaken your heart, you will gradually start hating the job search process.

This is where principle (4) comes into play. If you want peace of mind, don’t rejoice success or brood over failure. Just keep doing your work irrespective of success or failure. In this case, keep searching for jobs no matter what.

What causes more distress than your own failure is your friend’s success. Don’t you agree?

Don’t feel guilty about it. This is normal human psychology.

Stop tracking who got placed and what was the salary package offered to them. Your senses (eyes, ears) see and listen the news of friends’ job placements. You start calculating their earnings in an year, and compare how much money they would have earned while you are searching for jobs. The result of these calculations hurt your heart. Ultimately your job search process is hampered because of your senses, heart and mind. Accept principle (5) and learn to control them.

This is a tough thing to do. With gradual practice, you can master control over your mind, heart and senses. Once you achieve the control, there is no looking back in your life. Your confidence will skyrocket and job search becomes an enjoyable game, trust me.

The bottom line is, It does not matter how many times you fail or succeed, as long as you keep trying.

Like Nike says “Just Do It”

Are you a college student studying MCA, BSc or Engineering in India? doesn’t matter whether you are an electronics/electrical/mechanical/chemical/civil engineer, you might be knowing by now that you can get a software job  with some efforts.

Your friend or senior or even a relative might have as well given you a brief overview of how to get a software job by now. You are told that all you got to do is register to coaching classes that teach C language or Java or ASP dotNet or SAP. And chances are that you might already have enrolled or completed such an IT course in institutes like NIIT or SSI or Seed Infotech or any other institute famous locally.

Most of the students do the classes seriously for the first week, and slowly get bored as the coaching progresses towards the more complex topics. After crossing a limit of unbearably never ending theory, few of them discontinue the classes in the middle though they’d paid the fees for complete course.

I’m sure you have few friends who claim being smart; who keep giving unsolicited advices on what to do and what not to do at every twist of life. One such friend is likely to tell you that it is okay to learn a programming language enough to write a program that outputs “Hello World” on screen. And according to your “smart” friend you don’t need to waste your time in programming practice and you can easily “manage” to cheat the interviewer by blabbering theory in an interview.

This is NOT true. IT Interviewers are really smart people. They can accurately test your knowledge and your aptitude skill in brief meeting of 10-15 minutes in the interview. And these guys have enough experience to find out if you are just a “theoretical” swimmer. You can’t smartly manipulate them like you could manipulate the external examiners in viva conducted in semester practical exams.

So, what should you do to get a software job if you are an engineer or graduate from non-computers stream?

Take up the software coaching classes very seriously. Before you jump into action and join some institute, inquire whether the branch of training institute in your locality is good enough. Brand name of the coaching class is not a great indicator to know whether the institute is good enough.

For example if I’m in Chennai city, Tambaram area, and there is a nationally popular institute called XYZ coaching, it is not necessary that their branch in Tambaram is good enough. It is very much possible that T.Nagar branch has got the best faculty. More importantly, the trainers know how to “teach”. Simply blabbering theory about computer programming in broken English is not teaching. A training institute giving to away to students, loads of training “material” weighing 5 kgs is also of no practical benefit.

At the end of the course, you should elementarily be able to compile and execute a program on your own. And be able to convert a real world logic into a working software program.

For example, if I ask you to write a program to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, no ..no.. this program is a standard program readily available in every training material for you to memorize, let us say if I ask you to write a program to convert feet to inches, you should be able to do that. Memorizing a set of frequently asked programs is not the right solution. It can only save your face temporarily in an interview and fetch you job. But you will be embarrassed in future when you are asked to write a program to do some task.

So, don’t be lazy. Join a good training institute. Work hard and learn the practical part of programming before you start appearing for interviews.

NOTE: This is a past event. To get Job related articles to your email, subscribe to our website:

Like never before, it is raining IT  jobs for freshers in India.

Oracle Financial Services Software Limited is hiring 2010 passed out Engineering and MCA students on 7th August 2010 in Bangalore and Chennai.

Click on links below to quickly navigate to that section.
Venue Details |  Eligibility Criteria | Important Instructions | Selection Process

Venue Details:

Eligibility Criteria:

• Belongs to Engineering (CS / CE / IT / EE / ECE / Mechanical) or MCA
• Passed out in 2010 at first attempt
• Scored 60% and above in Class X
• Scored 60% and above in Class XII
• Scored 60% and above Engineering / MCA
• Scored 55% and above in undergraduate (applicable to MCA students only)
• Highest Degree should be accredited by AICTE (All India Centre for Technical Education)
• Only 1 year gap between Class XII and Undergraduate / Engineering is allowable
• Only 1 year gap between Undergraduate and MCA is allowable

Instructions:

• All eligible students must carry the following documents -
  • Identity proof such as Driver’s license/Passport/PAN/Voter’s Id, etc. (photo copy)
  • Two copies of Resume
  • Class X, XII mark sheets (photo copy)
  • Undergraduate degree (where applicable) photo copy
  • Post Graduate or Engineering degree / mark sheet showing the aggregate % (photo copy)
  • Two recent passport size photographs
• Entry into the selection process will ONLY be post verification of all the above documents.
• Candidates should carry Blue / Black ball pen.
• On completion of the selection process, all shortlisted candidates will be informed via email.

Selection Process:

Comprises of the following three stages –

1. Aptitude test
2. Technical interview
3. Behavioral interview

Each stage is an elimination round. Moving into the next stage is subject to clearing the previous stage.

Don’t forget to share this news with your friends

http://www.interviewmantra.net/2010/08/oracle-financial-services-walk-in-interview-for-freshers.html

Here is a Golden Job Opportunity for BCA, BSc Graduates of India to work with Infosys Technologies, the best managed company in India.

Eligibility Criteria:

• BCA or B.Sc graduates (Computer Science/ Electronics/ Mathematics/ Physics/ Statistics / Information Technology / Information Science only)
• Candidates who have graduated in 2008, 2009 & 2010 with experience of up to 24 months are eligible to apply
• Simple average aggregate of 60% throughout Class X, XII & Graduation.
• Should not have participated in the Infosys selection process in the last 9 months.
• Should be willing to relocate and work in a 24×7 environment.

If you qualify the above criteria, email your resume to

graduates@infosys.com

on/before 23^rd July, 2010.

Short listed candidates will be informed via e-mail about the selection process.

If you wish to send your resume through employee reference, email your resume to us at

sridhar@interviewmantra.net

I can’t emphasize enough how important the Key Skills section in your Naukri profile is!

To get interview calls to positions whose nature of work differs from that of your current profession or field of work, simply mention the keywords related to the job you aspire for.

For example, if an IT engineer wishes to apply for finance related jobs in addition to IT jobs, he would mention the following in his Key Skills.

Key Skills:

Java,C,finance,accounts,financial analyst,financial manager

Let us say an Embedded System Engineer is looking for IT jobs. His Key Skills should be something like this.

Key Skills:

Embedded systems,microcontroller,java,C,SQL

Say a developer wishes to switch role to a tester. Here is an imagination of which Key Skills that person should write.

Key Skills:

SQL,UNIX,testing,manual,automated,QTP,regression,

In a lighter note, if Sachin Tendulkar secretly wanted to become a Singer like Lata Mangeshkar, he would mention his key skills as following.

Key Skills:

Cricket,one day,test,20 20,singer,playback,artist,bollywood.

The reason why he mentioned cricket skills first is that he doesn’t want to drastically make a career shift to the line of Singing. This suggests Naukri search that Sachin is still open for opportunities in cricket along with playback singing. Sachin wants to play safe, like he does in ground.

Are you a 2010 pass-out anxiously waiting to get an IT job (in India)?

Email your resume immediately to:

freshers@infosys.com

Voila! Your resume will be stored in the database of Infosys Technologies. If you are lucky, in a couple of months, you will receive a computer generated email from Infosys shortlisting you for an off campus placement test.

You can surely count on this technique as I have known friends who are working for Infy who had got placed by emailing their resume to the above mentioned email id.

Ensure that your resume includes your date of birth, aggregate academic credentials of standards 10, 12 Engineering / Graduation, Post Graduate and E-mail ID for communication.

Send in your resume, mentioning the following in the subject line:

Job Code – Preferred Location of Selection Test
Example: “SWT-01 – BANGALORE”

Good Luck to you!