Hi Ruchir,
Couldn't locate your query in the AI folder on my PC and hence initiating a fresh thread. Glad indeed to learn that you have aced your Management course and are considering a career in marketing. Having been in this field for 23 years, let me make the following observations : a) Marketing, being the only revenue generating function in an enterprise, is always a high-pressure career. It may be glamorous, but, lots of blood, sweat and tears go into a successful marketing career. b) Organisations are of two types - the ones in which marketing is the line activity and the others in which it is a mere staff function. Hindustan Unilever, P & G etc are examples for the former and companies like Reliance, TCS etc are examples for the latter. If one is in the marketing team of the latter kind of company, one gets the pressure cooker treatment alright (like in the case of other category of companies too), but, not much say in the product conceptualization, design etc which sets additional constraints on the marketing guy. One should always strive to join a marketing-oriented company, not just a company which professes lip service to the marketing philosophy and has a marketing department on paper. (For understanding the difference between two companies in the same field who actually practice marketing and just pay lip-service just see the instant success of Tata DoCoMo as against the initial hype of Reliance Infocom when it launched in 2002 and how the customer enrolments vapourised due to disillusionment.) c) Marketing, in a software company, has several sub-functions such as pre-sales, business development, key account management etc. Depending on one's technical back-ground, mobility skills and the kind of work one prefers to do (whether desk bound documentation oriented, or field level, customer facing) one should choose one's role carefully. d) Software industry is going through a flux - the traditional application development & management services (the bread and butter of Indian IT majors) has to make way for value-added services like consulting, product implementation and even cloud computing. Please factor this trend while zeroing in on the kind of company you want to work with. e) The HR guys who call at campuses are chasing numbers and do not have the mandate or breathing space to look at differently abled candidates. I am sure even Dr Stephen Hawking would not have gotten selected if the same HR guys had called in at Cambridge University in mid-sixties. (smile) So, you will have to do some background work to communicate your skills and enthusiasm to prospective IT companies that you have short-listed. (I remember Sriram faced the same kind of issues when he was facing campus recruitment interviews at IIM B.) Perhaps, you should get yourself introduced to decision takers (CEOs, as I had done in my case) through for a like The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE), Nasscom, Computer Society of India, Project Management Institute etc. This will bring you under the limelight and get them interested. Perhaps, Asif, Divyanshu and Ajay Dhanag who have all passed out from good B schools and are in good corporates can guide you better. All the best, Ruchir and God bless you... Rgds RS + 98 472 76 126 Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
