Are you `fit' for work?

NO MATTER what your profession - a dairy scientist or a diplomat, an analyst or a zoologist, you will never be able to stand professionally idle or underutilised. Dynamism is the new catchword and anyone who deals with the problem of constant upward mobility needs to progress beyond his peers. It isn`t enough to be merely `good' at one`s work, one requires to excel to make the difference. To do so, one has to be totally up to date with the latest that is happening in one's chosen field.

The biggest issue facing the professional of today - it is immaterial which the discipline happens to be or how old you are - is obsolescence. Yesterday's skill-set and yesterday's knowledge has no value. One has necessarily to be `with it'. You need mental aerobics and skill-set calisthenics to stay `in shape' for the future.

Doing this is not the easiest thing to do. The usefulness of the fresh executive with his original skill-set and knowledge base is anything between five and seven years. Most companies require the knowledge-bases of these executives to have completely renewed during this period. In India, the `tolerance' limit of the older companies stretches to about ten years. The younger, high-tech companies do not have the patience to wait for this renewal. Much would depend on the dynamism of the professional concerned. While many of the older companies conduct management development courses, most of them expect their managers to have renewed themselves through their own efforts. Most management development groups teach the participants how to use their new skills and knowledge, not how to increase, develop and enhance them. As a diplomat, how boned up are you on Clinton`s stopover in Pakistan; if you are a hardware specialist, can you advise your organisation to go in for an AMD Athlon CPU in preference to a PIII 750?

It is not the high-tech world that is changing, it is the happening thing in every field, be it academics or research. New methodologies are burgeoning in every area. Scientists and engineers are particularly susceptible to obsolescence. Their need to stay `fit' is far more urgent than anyone else. What you learned in business school, premier or otherwise, has little validity in today's world of galloping galvanism. Should you become out of date as a manager, you can confidently expect to be on the dole. The tragedy is that in India, we don't have a `dole'! Even historians, who have traditionally been focussed in the past are getting into their gym-socks to redefine the way the subject is functionalised to suit the requirements of today's students.

Pointers to stay ahead should include the following regimens to enchance and reinvent yourself:

*Insure yourself and your job by continuous learning: Most professions have courses going on all the time. Seminars and workshops are held all the time, attend them as you might to your fitness regime. These self-learn, self-consentise programmes do actually help...it just depends what you personally gain from them. They are, like your daily physical workout, repetitive perhaps, but they help keep you from a systems failure!

*Keep your eyes and ears open: Never neglect to pay attention to anything new that is happening in your profession. Talk about it to your peers and superiors. This helps you to clarify your thoughts on the innovation and it helps to extract information that they may have which perhaps would not have come to you any other way. It also helps to let the boss know that you are on the proverbial ball! Invest in the future, just as you would with your disposable surpluses. Networking is the new mantra that has become the chant of developmental gurus. Attend industry events, read the latest from the best sources, in short, be seen, be noticed!

*Talk to the right people and go straight to the source: Most of what you need to know about what your company needs is available in the company itself. It figures, after all they are the ones who are looking for fresh blood, fresh skill-sets and fresh knowledge. Get from them a profile of what they need and develop those criteria within yourself. If there is a specific area of expertise needed a month down the line by the company you can become the resident expert in the subject before the new hirings take place. Very soon the boss group will look to you to be the in-house expert on everything!

*Look at whats happening outside your window!: You may not be affected by changes happening in other agencies and other industries. IT may not have created redundancies in your area. Trust me, it may not have happened today. It will certainly happen tommorrow. This is the time for you to apply the lessons from what you can see happening outside your workplace. Figure out ways and means to be a jump ahead of the axe.

If people are going to be made redundant, you should ensure that you are not one of them. You have to make certain that you are the only one who has ridden the wave rather than have sunk in the troughs of the trade! List down the effects of the trend and the ways it is bound to affect your area. Sharpen the skills you need to skim over the shoals of the threat.

When you apply your mind to it, you will see that obsolescence is an issue that you need to factor into your career plans. Changing jobs is no answer, studies have revealed the dismal truth that job-hop specialists need to hop as their staleness in the organisation sets in even before they begin to settle down. A fresh mind being imported complete with impressive profile and exaggerated salaries are very soon discovered to be no better than the people they come to replace. Their skill-sets and knowledge is no better than the exisiting talent and the net result is that they are left in no doubt that their survival would depend on their finding themselves another lucrative slot elsewhere! While it is true that job requirements are changing, you need to prove that you are capable of surviving that change by keeping ahead in every area. You need to have that edge, that knowledge quirk that puts you above the rest. If you ensure that you will not merely survive, you will thrive!

Abhimanyu Acharya

abhimanyu@india.com