MR SATISH PRADHAN

Executive VP - Group HR Tata Sons Ltd. Mr. Satish Pradhan is Executive Vice President Group HR Tata Sons. he Heads the Tata Group HR function. Prior to joining the group in April 2001, he was with ICI Plc in London at their Head Office as Organization Design & Development Manager (Group Human Resources). He has a Masters in History from Delhi University and has worked in Public Sector and Private Sector companies. During the last 24 years he has worked with Steel Authority of India Ltd, CMC Ltd, ICI India Ltd, Brooke Bond Lipton India Ltd, ICI Plc. in various capacities in the HR area. He has worked extensively in the areas of global leadership development and competency frameworks. He is a keen 'bird watcher' and wild life enthusiast. He is also closely involved with community development activities. He is on the Board of :

Tata Institute of Social Sciences Tata AutoComp Systems Ltd. (and member of Remuneration Committee) Tal Manufacturing Solutions Ltd. Automotive Stampings and Assemblies Limited (and Chairman of the Audit Committee) Tata Services Ltd. Computational Research Laboratories Pvt. Ltd Advanced Computing Solutions Pvt. Ltd

He is also a member of :

The Technical Advisory Committee on HR of Reserve Bank of India The Board of National HRD Network The Executive Committee of the Bombay Natural History Society Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) National Committee on HRD and Women's Empowerment

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Popular jobs for overseas management/finance graduates

As it’s the placement season here in IFIM B SCHOOL, We came up with an informative Article covering the news on INDIAN and INTERNATIONAL job Market.

Management and finance being the most essential functions for every business, there is a broad range of job opportunities available for graduates having an overseas management or finance degree. TimesJobs.com lists the popular job options…

Finance

1. Corporate Finance Advisor

Job Description: A Corporate Finance Advisor specialises in mergers and acquisitions. A finance advisor mediates these transactions and protects the interests of the client, either the company doing the bidding or the targeted company.

Hot Skills: Problem-solving ability, agility and flexibility, thorough knowledge and hands-on efficiency with computer literacy (data crunching and management), risk management ability and master persuaders with a streak of sales are the best fit for this job.

Salary Range: Starting from Rs 4.5 lakh per year.

2. Tax Accountants

Job Description: Tax Accountants assist clients with their financial and income statements. They prepare federal, state and local tax returns for businesses, organisations and individuals. The person should have complete knowledge of financial management and accounting.

Hot Skills: Complete knowledge of accounts and accounting basics, ability to work on preparation of balance sheet, profit and loss account, BRS, finance and tax basics.

Salary Range: Rs 2.7-3 lakh per year.

3. Investment Bankers

Job Description: Investment Bankers are like financial consultants for corporations, which is precisely where the Corporate Finance Group comes into play. Big money and long hours are the hallmarks of the investment banking industry. The role includes helping firms devise and implement financial strategies, analyse their financial needs (structuring balance sheets, etc) and work with the sales and trading departments to determine valuations for new offerings. The role also includes activities such asunderwriting, selling and trading securities (stocks and bonds), providing financial advisory services such as mergers and acquisitions and managing assets.

Hot Skills: Research ability, focused attention, risk management, thorough knowledge of general accounting and financial planning,

Salary Range:  Starting from Rs 4 lakh per year 

Management

1. Research Analyst

Job Description: The role involves performing extensive primary and secondary research to build a detailed understanding of the targeted market, industry, company or opportunity. The person must be capable of analysing and synthesizing research findings to develop valuable insights and strategic recommendations for the client.

Hot Skills: Strong analytics and research skills, discretion and ability to work with sensitive and confidential information, comfort working against aggressive daily goals for thorough output, detail-oriented and excellent follow-ups.

Salary Range: Rs 3.5-4 lakh per year

2. International Marketing & Sales

Job Description: The role involves interaction with clients, generating and closing leads, handling and maintaining client relations, reviving dormant accounts and ensuring customer satisfaction. Most importantly the person should ensure his/her revenue targets are met.

Hot Skills: Business development management, negotiation and analytical skills and strategic and tactical thinking.

Salary Range: Starting from Rs 5 lakh per year

3. Entrepreneurs

Job Description: There are many industries where wealth creation is possible be it the internet and IT, personal services, media, engineering or small local business. If you want to be self-employed or an entrepreneur, explore a new business concept or buy a franchise. He/she needs to have motivation to practice his dream. It’s important to be savvy and understand what is and is not realistic.

Hot Skills: Willing to pursue career in entrepreneurship, must be hard-working, smart, creative, willing to take risks and people management skills.

Salary Range: There is no salary range for being an entrepreneur. One is paid what he/she earns using his/her business wits.

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Crosswords 16

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WHAT AFFECTS YOUR PERFORMANCE?

Source:Dilbert.com

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Five HR strategies for mid size firms to retain the right talent

One of the core HR challenge that mid size firms face is good talent leaving the organisation for better opportunities in large enterprises which might promise a brand image, better compensation package or a better career path.

In an exclusive interaction, Keyuri Singh, VP-HR, Blue Star Infotech - a mid size IT company - talked about some basic work culture-centric HR strategies which can go a long way in building a strong motivation within the employees to work within the mid size firm.

1) Have a 'real' open door policy
A lot of organisations talk about the importance of having an open door policy but not many actually follow this at the ground level. Many times this happens because the CXOs are not approachable.

Within a mid size firm, CXOs must not only focus on the business but also be a people's person who believes in a transparent work culture. Only if the top management is transparent, would this work culture percolate down the hierarchies and employees would develop faith in the company.

2) Cut-throat competition is toxic: discourage it
Within a lot of large as well as mid size enterprises there is unhealthy competitiveness between colleagues in the same team. Though, at the individual level employees might be motivated by the sole aim of growing themselves to the next level, this is toxic for the collective success of the business function or the project.

In the spirit of competitiveness, employees tend to ignore collaboration and asking for or providing help, which is essential for the business to grow. Mid size companies should take care to encourage collaborative work culture and reward collaborative efforts. This sends out a positive message among the employees that the organisation respects and encourages collaboration and growing together as a team and not just as individuals.

A good way to encourage such a culture is leading by example. The top management should set examples within the organisation of how they collaborate with each other to collectively reach a single business goal.

3) Build employee trust in HR
For growing mid size companies, people are its strength. Any kind of office politics or employee issues which could lead to attrition cannot be afforded by the company. So, it becomes even more important for the HR heads of mid size companies to actually be there for its employees, listen to their problems objectively and deal with the problems in a way that the employee who had raised the concern doesn't face any threats or intimidation from the person who has been reported about.
Only if the HR team can become efficient and equipped to tackle such people issues, would the employees be willing to talk about their challenges freely, without being scared.

4) Understand what motivates high performers to stay
Every individual is unique. So are the reasons why an employee would like to work in your mid size firm. The reasons could be a combination of factors such as money, learning opportunities or work-life-balance - with each employee allocating different levels of significance to each.
Since there is no one size that fits all, the HR team in mid size firms need to focus on the personal needs of high performers and offer them a combination of what they attach importance to. This will ensure that personal aspirations of high performers are met and they know they have a robust career path within the company.

5) Give employees flexibility and freedom
At the end of the day, every employee - irrespective of the size of the business in which he/she works - appreciates flexibility and some degree of freedom.
Allowing flexi-timing to employees, as long as they finish the fixed shift hours; allowing work-from-home for certain number of days during the month; giving expectant mothers enough maternity leaves and welcoming them back into the system are few simple ways in which a mid size business can improve the happiness quotient for its employees and enhance the experience of working with the company.

When employees realise that the company is genuinely concerned about them and that the business considers them as a person with his/her own individual needs, the employee motivation to work for the company grows exponentially. 

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3 Tips to Retain and Develop Internal Talent

We all know that the hunt for top talent in organizations is getting very rough. The intention to recruit the best candidate in the industry is taking a competitive turn which is affecting the performance and productivity of an organization in a bad way. Companies are not able to step forward towards their innovative goals.

In the long run it is very important for an HR to feel that strategic and effective talent development and retention program will help the organization to continue its growth.

According to an article on businessreviewaustralia.com by Lee Hecht Harrison, global talent development leader, organizations can cut costs by retaining their existing talent rather than conducting recruitment processes. Developing the existing staff will lead to job satisfaction and engagement and increase in loyalty towards the organization.

Here are few of his tips on how to retain and develop internal talent:

1. Planning- Through new workforce planning process, organizations will be able to predict which positions will be mostly needed in the next few years. These predictions should be ultimately helpful for a leader to decide which employee can become the future leader. Workforce planning mainly includes employees who are appreciable in training and development of potential staff. Try to capture the experience, knowledge and skills from such employees before they leave.

2. Identify your resources- Try recognizing your precious employees in ways such as a creative thinker, ambitious and one who has the ability to adopt new practices quickly because they are the key to your success.

You can identify such employees by some signs such as-

 a. They are always confident with a competitive nature in leading change

 b. Energetic in finding new strategies to improve business performances

 c. Has the ability to communicate easily in multiple languages to deal with international markets.

Once you find such employees you are all set to implement your training and development approach.

3. Employee engagement- It is true that an engaged employee can contribute more in an organization than a non-engaged one. So, prepare training sessions for all employees as this will give them a clear idea of what the organization expects of them. By aligning organizational goals with their career goals, employees will have the faith that their employers are interested about their personal aims. This will also help the organization create a long term relationship with their employees.

In an economically unstable condition it is also very difficult to hire mainly because of the rising costs. So, it is better to identify internal talents in the organization and invest on their training and development.

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Rooftop solar plants to create 3.25L jobs in 10 years

Small rooftop solar power plants alone are likely to create 3.25 lakh jobs cumulatively in the next ten years in India, says a report.

“The small rooftop scenario (sector) would contribute the most to job creation, with around 3,25,000 cumulative new jobs in next ten years,” a report by Bridge to India, a company engaged in businesses like Strategic Consulting, Market Intelligence and Project Development, said.

The supply chain for small rooftop systems would include many intermediaries, spreading margins across more layers, it said.

The report divided the solar power sector into four segments – small rooftops, large rooftops, utility scale projects and ultra mega projects.

The average size of a small rooftop solar is 3 KWp (kilowatt peak), the power achieved by a solar module under full solar radiation. The average size of a large scale rooftop is 250 KWp, utility scale project 20 MW and that of ultra mega solar scheme is 1,000 MWp or 1 GWp.

In large rooftop systems, around 2.20 lakh cumulative jobs and in the utility scale scenario around 71,000 cumulative jobs will be created in the next 10 years.

The report added that the least number of jobs will be created in the ultra mega scale category. The total number of jobs in this scenario comes to only around 63,000 in ten years.

The general policy recommendations to enable the sector to grow under any of the four scenarios is creating transparent and dependable solar policies to encourage Indian and international investment.

They also include making available better financing instruments whether related to the end-consumer or infrastructure finance, making the electricity market more competitive and transparent with respect to power tariffs and grid usage and rules.

At present, the country’s installed solar power capacity stands at about 2,600 MW. The government has plans to scale this capacity up to 20,000 MW by 2022.

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Modi’s heavy technology investments will drive jobs

The sectors which will see an influx owing to technology uprising includes agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing and infrastructure especially in core departments such as railways, highways, roads, BFSI, retail and services…

India is poised to become an innovation and a manufacturing hub with the Modi’s Government impetus on heavy technology investments and zero-defect manufacturing. The first 100 days of the new government has already demonstrated a positive impact on the economy as well as the jobs market.

According to Praveen Bhadada, senior director, Zinnov, a leading management consultancy, the stage is all set to create a long term sustainable growth and reposition India on the global map. The positive track record of the new government has instilled hope for an economic turnaround in citizens and investors. “Technology, by means of digitisation in sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, infrastructure and education, will attract a USD 26 billion investment from the government in the years 2014-15.”

Talking about how the investment in technology will spell out in terms of jobs, he mentioned that focus on technology helps in ensuring the global competitiveness of organisations and creates jobs for technology professionals, especially honed in cloud mobility, analytics and IoT (Internet of Things).

The sectors which will see an influx owing to this technology uprising includes agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing, infrastructure especially in core departments such as railways, highways, roads, BFSI, retail and services, added Bhadada.

Ø  Digitisation: In focus across government functions

There is good opportunity for technology MNCs to target digitisation across government functions. The new government plans to take digitalisation to the next level by implementing the digitalisation of agriculture & PDS data, enabling e-governance & m-governance, facilitating the National Rural Internet and Technology Mission, using IT for real time information gathering, and the digitisation of all government files. In the past, the government has engaged multiple MNCs such as IBM, HP and Cisco for digitisation projects.

Ø  Technology: Establishing next generation infrastructure

The Indian government plans to invest USD11 billion in key focus areas to drive the next wave of technology-backed infrastructure growth. The key focus is to create national optical-fibre networks and build 100 smart cities with high-speed digital highways along with national solar missions and national gas grids. To fulfil this task, the demand for technology skill-sets across all experience levels will rise.

Ø  India: The global manufacturing hub

With Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Make in India’ campaign to help India transform into a global hub for manufacturing, Bhadada believes the Indian Manufacturing Industry presents a USD 8 billion opportunity for the ICT sector by 2017. With the government’s push for manufacturing backed by increasing adoption of IT and increasing relevance of IoT in manufacturing will help create more jobs.

To support the plan, the government has also planned to set up 14 IITs, IIMs and AIIMs to develop an innovative ecosystem fostering high quality research. “The idea is to boost India centric product development for global consumption. This ecosystem will also allow joint R&D efforts across industries for accentuated product development”.

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Yahoo starts fresh layoffs in India

Internet firm Yahoo has started a fresh set of layoffs in India, affecting hundreds, as it seeks to consolidate its product engineering teams at its headquarters in Sunnyvale. While senior executives will be offered a position in Sunnyvale, a majority have been handed pink slips, said a source.

India operations will be reduced to support and operations functions. Yahoo India R&D head Hari Vasudev and a few other senior executives have been asked to move to the US. Amit Dayal, vice president of search and marketplaces, has already shifted there.

Ø  Hiring stopped a year ago

Vasudev had taken over from the then Yahoo India R&D head, Shouvick Mukherjee, who himself had moved to Sunnyvale in 2013.

“The writing was on the wall. They’d stopped hiring about a year ago and the layoffs picked up speed in the last couple of weeks,” the recruiter said. Yahoo said in a statement that it will continue to have a presence in India but is looking to consolidate some teams into fewer offices.

In 2002, Yahoo was one of the first multinational corporations to set up research & development in India and others such as Google followed suit. At the time, it was Yahoo’s second-largest R&D centre outside the United States.

Yahoo appointed former Google executive Marissa Mayer to turn around the company’s fortunes in 2012. Under Mayer, Yahoo has bought social networking platform Tumblr, mobile analytics firm Flurry and new aggregator Summly. It also received a $5 billion windfall from the IPO of Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba.

Experts pointed out that a few other companies have moved major product development out of India, including Google, Cisco, Broadcom and Texas Instruments that have shifted parts of their product engineering closer to their headquarters.

Sharad Sharma, former CEO of Yahoo India R&D, said the trend is due to a combination of factors such as politics, changing structure of technology teams and the perception in Silicon Valley.

“It is not acceptable any more in the United States to hire in India at their expense,” said Sharma. Technology teams have also become smaller with each having specialist roles. “The lack of specialists for each team means such teams aren’t getting created anymore and it is affecting India adversely,” said Sharma, founding member of software products thinktank iSpirt.

The success of companies like Apple and Facebook in emerging markets has also created the perception that products for emerging markets can be made from the Valley

Large companies have started focusing on fewer products and that could be one reason, said an industry expert who requested anonymity. The growth of agile product development methodology also requires more and more co-location, he said.

Pari Natarajan, head of market expansion advisory firm Zinnov, however, said that India remains an attractive destination for companies to set up offshore R&D centres.

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Hiring records 14% growth; IT/Telecom shine

The Indian job market is touching new highs with the IT/Telecom industry writing its strongest growth story with a 20 per cent increase in jobs in just one month, reports RecruiteX, the Jobs Index by TimesJobs.com. The index recorded a 14 per cent increase in September 2014 over August 2014. From January 2014 to September 2014 period, there has been a 21 per cent increase in demand for IT/Telecom professionals, shows RecruiteX. This is clearly an exciting time for IT job-seekers in India Inc. They never had it so good in recent times.

Ø  Demand doubled for Senior IT professionals

The hiring pattern is strong across all levels in the IT/Telecom industry. The time is best for senior IT professionals to look for a job. Job opportunities have doubled for senior IT professionals with over 20 years of experience, with a 67 per cent increase from January 2014 to September 2014 period. IT professionals with 10-15 years experience reported a 20 per cent increase during the same period.

As per the data, software engineers, application programmers, database administrators (DBA), graphic designers/animators/web designers and project leaders/project managers are the hottest jobs in the IT industry, currently.

Ø  Jobs galore across industries

The good news is that the abundance in jobs is not limited to the IT/Telecom industry only. The ITeS/BPO industry has also reported an 18 per cent increase in job postings in September 2014. Hiring in high-volume sectors such as BFSI, retail, healthcare/pharmaceutical/biotechnology is on a revival mode. Post the announcement of Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Make in India’ campaign, hiring has stabilised in manufacturing driven sectors such as manufacturing/engineering, automobiles/auto components, consumer durables/FMCG and projects/infrastructure in September 2014 over August 2014.

According to the RecruiteX, employers are actively looking for Research and Development professionals as they witnessed a 27 per cent growth in jobs in September 2014. A strong demand pattern is also observed for HR/Training and Administrative profiles. Customer-centric profiles such as customer/service and marketing & advertising are also in demand.

Ø  Delhi Tops Recruitment Charts

Among the top metros, Delhi NCR is leading the recruitment charts with a 21 per cent increase in job postings followed by Bangalore. In tier I locations, Hyderabad reported a double-digit growth in demand.

Mid-level hiring, professionals with 5-10 years experience, was upbeat in September 2014. The demand for over 20 years experience and 2-5 years experience reported a 10 and 12 per cent growth, respectively.

Considering the current pattern, it seems the Indian job market will stabilise in the coming months as the major sectors are on a revival mode and stabilising hiring activity across core and support functions.

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