Nandan Sharalaya encourages Personal Branding for a Unique Career

The near future would see the batch of 2021 graduate and step into a world of new and unexpected challenges. Mr. Nandan Sharalaya, an alumni of SCMC and presently a staff of FTI consultancy stepped in as a guest lecturer for this session to give the students an idea as to what they can find and expect at the beginning of their career, what they should aim for and general tips to get one’s dream job. He began with an introduction of himself, from the choices he made in college, to the various paths he chose in his career including the Lamp fellowship, a German government fellowship, an unsuccessful venture at starting his own website, his interest in Broadcast journalism to how he landed his present job. 

After giving the students an idea about his own journey 8 years out of SCMC, he requested the students to share their names, their dream jobs and with whom they would like to switch lives which elicited a number of interesting responses from the students and made the session more interactive and engaging. He discussed some of these responses with the students. 

He then moved on to giving some crucial tips about what one can do once they step out of college such as pursuing higher education and finding interests and hobbies that they could invest time in besides their main jobs (such as running a blog, starting a website etc.) which can add value to their CV and make them potential candidates for future jobs. He also gave the potential benefits of shifting from job to job as well as remaining with a single organization for several years. 

He asked the students to determine whether they were generalists (moderately good at a number of things) or specialists (an expert at one particular skill) and decide their course of action for the future accordingly. He explained what students could do if they belonged to either of these categories. 

The session ended with an encouragement from Mr. Sharalaya to the students to reach out to the alumni and increase their network, maintain an updated and detailed LinkedIn profile, a few final tips and a question and answer round. This guest lecture was certainly a helpful source of information for the students who are soon to set out on their own journey in the professional world.