Career Trends - Start-ups are good option for talented Indians now

Very few HR executives, education institutions or successful CEO’s have touched upon this subject that Start-ups could also be a great option for aspirants in charting their careers in Corporate India today.

We have a mind-set that ‘Branded Study’ or and ‘Branded Career’ is the only road to success. Talk to any young graduate in Delhi or Mumbai University and you will hear one aspiration only - “ I want to join an MNC”. In fact this aspiration amongst Indians, are bestowed upon by parents and society at large. Look at Campus recruitment results of IITs or IIMs, you would not find a single soul opting for entrepreneurial career or career in a start-up. Even in B category management and engineering schools, it is the same story to some how get into the secured branded company or the Multi Nationals. Practically, all would want to join Consulting, Banking or would want to take up a job placement abroad.

Our terrific talent in India, either get absorbed into Corporations or into management schools post graduation, thus we miss out to garner the lateral and creative side of Indians or spark of new technologies, badly needed for future growth to compete with the changing world. Only when we have an environment where a young talent is excited to join the Start-ups or Innovation Labs, we could expect India delivering world changing products or ideas, lest we will remain the body-shopper for the world as is the case with China – Factory of the world.

I was impressed to read an article today in New Your Times that how best and the brightest talents in America (Silicon Valley phenomenon) from Stanford clamor to join Start-ups or New Tech companies like Google or Facebook vis-à-vis old behemoths like Microsoft / Oracle or Yahoo.

GARY RIVLIN and KATIE HAFNER reports in NYT today that engineering students stood as many as six lanes at the Google recruitment table at a job fair at Stanford last fall. Facebook’s representatives faced a similarly thick crowd vying for a few minutes of their time. At the Microsoft and Yahoo tables though, by contrast, students looked, but generally did not linger.
“Engineers in America want to work on tomorrow’s technology, not yesterday’s,” according to Bill Demas, quotes NYT, who worked at Microsoft through much of the 1990s and then at Yahoo until leaving last year. He is now chief executive at Moka5, a start-up of around 30 people based in Silicon Valley’s Redwood City. “If it’s perceived that Yahoo or anyone else is not focused on the future, it’s going to be very difficult to recruit top people,” Size is also an issue. For many young engineers, the future is in tiny start-ups, which offer a cozier work environment and greater ownership over a project, as well as the potential for a big payoff if the company is bought or sells shares to the public.

NYT gives a an example of Ben Newman, 23, who expects to graduate from Stanford in June with a master’s degree in computer science, is among those young pedigreed engineers who prefer the intimacy and excitement of a smaller company over the security of a large, established one. A merged Microsoft-Yahoo “definitely decreases my interest in either company,” said Mr. Newman, who interviewed with Facebook, the start-up of the moment, but took a job with Mozilla, creator of the Firefox browser.

Money, of course, is a factor in almost any engineer’s job-choosing calculus. Many of those students descending on recruiters from Google and Facebook were no doubt motivated by the idea of becoming rich in exchange for just a few years of hard work. Yet in Silicon Valley there is also the cool factor, and the prospect of potentially working on the hot new thing.

Even Google now, with 17,000 employees, has lost some of its luster as a top spot for engineers as the potential for big gains in its share price has begun to diminish. The company still receives more than 20,000 résumés a week, or two every minute, according to Sunny Gettinger, a Google spokeswoman. But it is also starting to lose engineers to start-ups and budding Valley stars like Facebook, including engineers like Pedram Keyani. NYT quotes Mr. Keyani, 30, started work at Google in June 2005, then left last summer for Facebook, which then had around 300 employees.

So, in essence the world is changing and it is changing fast. If one is looking at creating wealth in next 3 yrs for self, then one has to look at career switch into start-ups. It is true, that one could get an easy appointment for business, if one is working for a branded company and may have initial success and social value plus secured monthly pay-cheques, but that not be sufficient to motivate you for long. If more and more people will start getting richer and successful through Stock-Option routes (A start-up phenomenon), then we could expect a proper mix of corporate India, where we would have depth of talents spread across all types of organizations.

Indeed that will be a welcome change.

Manish K. Jaiswal
CEO – http://www.InsuranceMall.in

for
http://www.NewsandReviews.in (MKJ Blogs)

Link - http://www.buynowindia.com/newsandreviews/index.php/MKJ/