Career Counselling

Career Counselling

Career planning should be done to know what your goals are, where you stand and how far your goals are. You deserve a good salary, but you also need job satisfaction. Career counselling will help you find out what you need and what you deserve. Opportunities and hurdles will keep on coming in your life, but it is your determination to make use of the opportunities and remove the hurdles that would matter in the end.

The Career Counselling Process 

Self-Assessment
You should assess yourself before planning your career goals. Self assessment is important for knowing your own personality traits, strengths and weaknesses, interests, skills, values and beliefs. These parameters will help you in making decisions regarding your career. 

Industry Analysis

After analyzing yourself, you must explore your career options based on your interests, skills and your academic background. For the purpose you may prepare a list of options available to you and choose the best one. After you have chosen your field, you need to further explore the field and the various job profiles available in the area. You should be aware of the educational background, skills, competencies, training, experience, etc. needed to achieve your goals. 

Planning

After collecting all the information about the area you are interested in, you should develop a strategy to to meet your goals.

Evaluation

Evaluation is needed to assess your present status. It is important that you assess yourself from time to time to know whether your are on the right track or not. If you find that you are not on the right track you must reconsider everything regarding your career and set up new goals.

Salary Negotiation

Salary Negotiation

It is believed that salary negotiation is an art. A systematized process of salary negotiation actually helps the prospective employers in hiring the best suitable candidates. Salary negotiation, a critical and crucial step in the selection procedures also helps in filling the vacancies more quickly in bigger organizations. But the process of salary negotiation should be handled in a timely and effective manner. At the same time, it is also true that salary negotiation is one of the most under-rated and neglected aspect of the hiring process.

Tips for Salary negotiation: 

Most of the people are not aware of the right salary negotiation process. Salary negotiation needs a good sense of balance. It is quite natural that no company would afford to loose a potentially eligible candidate in today's competitive job market. One must remember that to a great extent, a candidate's present salary also determines the future salary. 

Handling Money Questions

How Much are You Worth?

How to Get the Raise You Deserve?

Pay packages differs depending on the industry standards set for different positions. You should be fully prepared before you start your negotiation process. Here is a list of some salary negotiation tips that will help you in achieving the best deal:

·  Begin the salary negotiation process only after receiving the formal offer from the company.

·  Do some research and properly evaluate the job profile and the offered pay packages in the market before you start your final negotiation process.

·  Don't lie about your previous pay package or salary.

·  When you are negotiating don't forget to negotiate about the entire offer including performance bonus and other benefits and not only the salary part.

·  It will ultimately raise your overall remuneration as expected. 

·  Your appearance and mannerism also influences your salary negotiation success rate.

·  Know your limits and always be aware of the things that are not negotiable and try to avoid those parts that will only lead to friction. Be clear and straight forward.

·  Most importantly, know about your strengths and your worth on the basis of an anecdotal information about how people having similar qualification like you are generally paid in the market. Your extra skills that you feel are important to the position will give you an extra edge.

·  Try to examine your own as well as the needs of the company. It will help you in selecting the right pay package that aptly suits your needs and qualification.

·  Exploring alternatives will help you in creating several options that satisfy everyone's needs and interests. 

·  Last but not the least, focus entirely on your objective criteria and your goal. If you have the winning tendency it will create problems in the salary negotiation process. 

The Peter Principle

The Peter Principle 

Bureaucracy at Work

The Peter Principle concept was describes the pitfalls of the bureaucracy in organizations witnessed during his extensive research into business organization and its management.

The Peter Principle book has attained such renown that The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as "The theory that employees within an organization will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent." ... "In a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their level of incompetence," or, as Dr. Peters Principal explained more simply, "The cream rises until it sours."

The Peter Principle is so appropriate and meaningful a lesson for business, that it has found its way into Master Degree (MBA) curriculae as a foundation for the next generation to protect itself. But it seems that this hierarchy within companies continues to be the organizational structure of choice for government and big business.

What is the Peter Principle?

Peter Principle Management is the concept that in bureaucratic organizations, new employees typically start in the lower ranks, but when they prove to be competent in the task to which they are assigned, they get promoted to a higher rank, generally management. This process of climbing up the hierarchical ladder can go on indefinitely, until the employee reaches a position where he or she is no longer competent. At that moment the process typically stops, since the established rules of bureaucracies make it very difficult to "demote" someone to a lower rank, even if that person would be a much better fit and happier in a non-management role. The net result of this principle is that most of the management levels of a bureaucracy will be filled by incompetent people, who got there because they were quite good at doing different (and usually, but not always, easier) work than the work they are currently expected to perform.

According to Laurence Johnston Pieter: Work is accomplished by those employees who have not reached their level of incompetence. Thus we can see why organizations still function even as Peter Principled employees accept one too many promotions. Laurence Peter provides an insightful analysis of why so many positions in so many organizations seem to be populated by employees who seem incompetent. This concept is likely to be ignored by most senior managers since to admit one's organization is suffering from this bureaucratic malady is admission that people have been improperly promoted. This, in turn, suggests that senior management might have attained their own level incompetence, and the problem is easily ignored, lest it become suggested that senior management be more closely examined for their incompetence.

An example:

If you're a proficient and effective software developer, you're most likely demonstrating peak competence in your job right now. As a result of your performance, your valuable contribution results in a promotion to a management position. In this new position, you now do few of the original tasks which gained you acclaim. In fact, little of your current job remains enjoyable, therefore your heart is no longer in your work, and it shows. Given this, promotions stop, and there you stay, until you retire or your company goes under due to mismanagement.

Companies will attract and expand on a certain level of incompetence. Once a company forms a culture of incompetence, only the incompetent staff will remain, and the competent ones will tire of trying to soar with eagles while surrounded by turkeys, and therefore leave.

The end result is that non-growing companies are more likely to have incompetent employees at many levels of the organizational structure whereas growing companies add new positions and employees so fast that the inevitable results of the Peter Principle may be forestalled so long as growth continues.

Management consultants who recognize that the Peter Principle is in full swing in their clients organization often recommend percussive sublimations and lateral arabesque for high ranking employees to make room for new employees, because new employees are not yet at their level of incompetence thus they can actually do the work they were hired to do which increases total output of the organization.  

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Lets Win Together!
Rajeev Kumar