When I got admission to IIM Ahmedabad in 2018, I wished that I had been informed about some important skills beforehand, which would have been useful there. In this article, I will explain to you those 5 skills, why it is necessary to learn them, what actually happens in a B-school, and how you can develop those skills. I will explain all of this.
Contents
1. Resume Making
Let us start with our first skill, which is resume making. Perhaps you might not know this, but how good your resume is is the number one factor in determining which company you will get.
What happens is when we go to any MBA college, the placement cell informs us that we cannot simply write any point in our resume. You have to get all those points approved. For instance, if there was an achievement in school, the school will approve it. If there was an achievement in college, the college will approve it. Only then will we be able to include it in the resume.
Now imagine you have reached an MBA college. You only have 3 months. You have such a heavy workload. You have to do this and that too. You are also reaching out to your school or college. What happens is that sometimes, within those 3 months, people get delayed in bringing that proof. Due to this, despite being qualified and having good achievements, those points cannot be added to their resume. This impacts the internships companies they get.
You have to reach out to different authorities. You have to do this even before your admission. Go meet everyone in school, college, and everywhere. Tell them that you have been admitted to this college. At the same time, you are intimating them that you may have to come back in the future for those proofs.
Now, how do you learn the skill of resume making? For this, you need to learn the art called CV framing. This means the points you want to include in your CV, how to formulate those points effectively. I explained this in a previous video, which I will also link in the description. It guides you on which points to focus on so that you understand these things in a timely manner.
2. Self-Exploration
The second skill that we need to learn is self-exploration. When we enter a business school, we often feel confused about which field to pursue, which is perfectly okay. What happens is we become part of a herd mentality. If everyone is going into consulting, then we also start leaning towards consulting without understanding where our interest lies.
Please remember, don’t compete, don’t compare with other people. It’s your own journey that you are exploring. This is the best time to take risks. Understanding how to recognize your own interests in a field is the second skill you need to learn.
Learning Self-Exploration Skills
Now the question arises, how will you learn this skill? Firstly, you have to build enough self-esteem and confidence so that you don’t fear the possibility of not being good at something. You should know that every person excels in a specific field. This is what we call specific knowledge.
Perhaps you’ve heard about this concept in Naval Ravikant’s podcast. If you don’t know the meaning of specific knowledge or how to build it, I will link Naval Ravikant’s blog post in the description. Please do read it as it will be very helpful for you.
When I was in college, I also figured out that my interest lies in the field of marketing. I wanted to pursue just that. That’s why I didn’t even sit for consulting companies, even when I had those shortlists.
There are only 3 steps to learn this skill:
- Build confidence in yourself.
- Explore and learn from everyone.
- Finally, build on your specific knowledge.
3. Productivity
Our third skill is productivity, which is a very important and interesting thing because there are so many tasks throughout the day that you can’t manage everything. You have to leave some tasks or another. Imagine assignments, quizzes, many club activities, along with seniors bothering you to do this and that. In that case, you have to learn what to prioritize and what to skip.
Learning Productivity Skills
Let me share an incident. I was preparing for my quiz in college, and we had a lot of books to cover. So, I thoroughly read the book to prepare for the quiz. However, when the quiz actually took place, I scored very low marks, while many other classmates scored well. So, I asked a student, “I’ve read the entire book, but my marks aren’t good, while you scored so well. Can you guide me on how you prepared?”
He told me about a resource called ‘black book.’ The book contains all the past year’s papers that were given by the same professors last year. Meaning, if I had known about the black book earlier, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time reading the entire book.
But how did all this come about? When you understand what is necessary and how to save your time. I would also recommend making your to-do list. Even today, I make my to-do list on a daily basis. It helps me identify my important tasks that I must complete, allowing me to avoid all other tasks. If you learn to save time, you can literally do anything.
Recommended Resource: Oswaal Books
A great resource for saving time that I would recommend, which has also sponsored this video, is Oswaal Books. If any of you are preparing for MBA exams, how can this book help you? If you have studied the concepts of time, speed, and distance and practiced questions, but now you want to see which questions came in 2023, 2022, or 21 related to time, speed, and distance, what will you do? You will pick up past year papers and manually search for which questions were asked.
This book is made to save you from that hassle. When you open the chapter on time, speed, and distance, you will find all those questions mentioned year-wise, from 1999, 2000, and every year thereafter. So, your time is saved, isn’t it? Keep searching for techniques like this that save your time and make you more productive. The name of this book is ‘CAT 25 Year Past Papers,’ which means you’ll get chapter-wise, year-wise questions and their detailed solutions for the past 25 years’ papers. I will add the link in the pinned comment and description. You can check it out.
4. Networking
Our fourth skill is networking. I wish someone had told me that this is important because I was a very shy, underconfident kind of person. I used to feel a lot of anxiety talking to people. Generally, what happens is that this attribute stops you from learning from others. It stops you from talking to them.
Learning Networking Skills
When you go to a business school, you will get the opportunity to interact with many people: your juniors, batchmates, seniors, and alumni. If you maintain the ability to learn from every person, you will feel that at the end of your journey, you have tremendous knowledge of different industries. This ability will greatly help you in switching jobs.
For instance, my batchmates and I have graduated. When they try to enter any job, they always check if any of our seniors, batchmates, or juniors are already working in that company. Because if we have networked with them before, then they would be very likely to refer us. I have struggled a bit in this area as I couldn’t make many friends on my campus. However, I have worked with many life coaches or therapists to build this skill. Now, I feel comfortable talking to different people.
You can read a book to grow your self-esteem. The one I really like is called ‘The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem.’ I would recommend that you give this book a try. I will also add the link to it. It will help you understand how you can increase your self-esteem.
5. Communication
The fifth very important skill is communication, particularly communication in English. Whether you are in a classroom setting, a job interview, or even working in a corporate environment, you need to communicate in English. Many of you may not feel confident because you think your English is not that good. You may not need extensive vocabulary as much as you need brevity, meaning conveying your ideas in as few words as possible.
Learning Communication Skills
I would recommend that if you want to learn this skill, simply take a paper and pen, and write down whatever line comes to your mind. Then try to make it more concise, see how you can convey it in even fewer words. That will improve your brevity skill a lot. Also, there is a channel where speeches are given. There, you can check out speeches by Indian actors, or even if you are interested in Hollywood actors, you can watch their interviews.
When we listen to someone speaking in English, we can observe where they pause and how they convey their message. Plus, obviously, watching them improves grammar, fluency, and everything else. I will also add the link to that.
I truly hope everything I have shared helps you.
