Last updated on May 24th, 2021 at 11:36 am
Imagine you have three applicants for a job. They are all similar in that they both have degrees from top universities, graduated top ten percent in their class, have excellent analytical abilities, have passed all your aptitude tests and technical rounds with aplomb. During the final round the first one walks into the interview without a smile and armed with a brusque attitude, the next walks in with a nervous disposition, swallows his answers and sweats profusely while the third settles down with a smile and a firm handshake, maintains eye contact, listens to the questions without interruption and then coherently answers the question. During a group discussion, the first one is rude and authoritative, the second shy and submissive while the third understands the value of the another's point of view and is able to steer the discussion towards a final conclusion. It's quite easy to predict who you'll pick and why. But the other two don't often realise why they got cut out because everyone in the room underestimates the value of personality and what is now widely known as the Emotional Intelligence Quotient. (EI or EQ)
Sonya Hooja, Director, says, "We have an Alumni interaction program and our alumni often come back to speak to our current students. The one thing they constantly refer to is the value of the soft skill training they had when they were here. They always emphasize its importance to our current students and tell them not to miss the soft skill sessions as people often take them for granted."
Pradeep Khanapure, our EI trainer says,
"Soft skills is a huge component of our total curriculum. Take CIBOP Excellence for instance. The entire program consists of around 210 hours or so and soft-skills accounts for 50 hours, that's almost 25%. For CIBIT, it is almost 40 hours. Our corporate engagements focus on it even more and it accounts for more than 90 hours for our Corporate Training program for a leading investment bank. In fact in our IFAP program, basic excel is their second session. Most freshers come to us completely ignorant of the most critical software used in finance. How can they hope to learn anything if they don't know how to navigate an excel spreadsheet. Their confidence in excel will reflect in their confidence in putting together a high quality financial model and graphs that clearly communicate their analysis. This will in turn lead to more confident and competent financial analysts. This assertiveness will spill over into other parts of their life.This is how EQ is developed. "
But what do they learn in softskills?
Our Inter personal skills segment can be divided into three broad sections:
- Communication : Focuses on the quality of written and oral communication and includes presentation training, mock interviews that are video taped and played back as well as group discussion sessions.
- Applied Skills : Basic and Advanced Excel training and power-point skills.
- Personal Development : Here they are taught about the 7 habits of efficient people
Next week, we will delve a little further into Personal Development and understand what we do in 7 habits of efficient people.
