Here are some gems:
So what made you discover your passion in your job?
Any shreds of doubt I may have harboured in my mind about a career in Sales & Marketing vanished the moment I entered the Patna godown of my company as a freshly confirmed Area Sales Manager. The guard stood up and gave me a cracking salute!
People have strange reasons for doing strange things, which they are loath to admit. But to be perfectly honest, the communal standing-up of the staff whenever ASM-saheb entered was a very important reason for me. That - and the Murgh Malai Kabab at Hotel Chanakya.
It is in the United States of Bihar (including today's Jharkhand as well) that I became a hard-nosed salesman who saw it all. Kidnapped distributors. Rifles at contract terminations. Diverted trucks. Bounced DDs. I saw it all with a childish glee. And wrote about it as well.
So, what kept me in Sales & Marketing?
The most important reason is, of course, that I have reached a state where I thank my lucky stars that I love doing what I do because I have now become unemployable in other jobs.
Also, this is one job that never gets the limelight but never the sack either. So, when hot-shot I-bankers careen wildly between million dollar bonuses and bankruptcy filings, Brand Managers of soaps & oils remain solidly in a band of 10% growth in sales volumes, salary increase and body weight. Even if we did have the brains to trade in currencies & commodities, we certainly don't have the balls!
The third reason is probably that in no other profession do you get to meet so many interesting (read: crazy) people and go to so many exotic (read: inhabitable) places. In all my sales stints, I used to churn out monthly newsletters, which got forwarded far and wide. The people who complimented me for my imagination probably never realised that I was reporting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!
If you do blog about it, leave a comment here with your URL. Will link to your post as well.
Exploring your passions and finding the best career for your personalty can be difficult for many reasons. When I joined the workforce, my problem was that I had TOO MANY things I was interested in, and wasn't sure what I should do. Luckily, my organization publishes and uses a wide variety of personality assessments, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and Strong Interest Inventory tools. The Myers-Briggs helped me explore the most prevelant aspects of my personality to help me think about the sort of work environment and work style I was looking for, and the Strong helped me narrow my interests into the right field and learn how different careers job-functions matched up with my interests. For example, I was extremely interested in writing, and wanted to be a "writer" for a career, but after realizing most people start out in tech or grant writing, and that the job calls for a lot of time alone, I realized I would be better off using my writing skills in a more varied work environment. I was also really interested in academic and research psychology, but after learning about the beauracracy inherent in the education system and realizing a lot of the job tasts involved administration and data entry, I realized my personality type was a lot more suited to applied psychology where I could use insights about people to achieve success in a business. Sitting down and really examining your interests and personality, and being realistic about the job functions of a particular career path can really help you get started, and make the right career decisions.
ReplyDeleteEasy now. I was born in Bihar.
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