Preface

Observation 1 Take a walk around in any city or town in India and you will find ever growing numbers of institutes and academies, big and small, for teaching English, training in General Discussion Personal Interview (GDPI) and for personality development in general. Go inside any of them and you will see that they are full of students.

Why?

Observation 2 There are so many jobs out there and there are so many job seeking candidates out there. Seems like an ideal situation. Yet, so many posts remain vacant and so many candidates remain unemployed.

Why?

Because, there are certain essential facets of a well rounded character that schools and colleges fail to develop in young people as they lay too much emphasis on theory, rote and scoring and thus despite being academically qualified, the employers find most candidates unemployable.

Because of this, there is a real and a felt need amongst the young workforce for the improvement of these skills. They recognize the fact that an enhanced personality, better English skills and GDPI skills helps them in landing better jobs. They recognize the fact that now just their qualifications alone are not enough to land the dream job as there is too much of competition specially for the masses who are not from the premier institutes. Improvement of these skills greatly improves their employability and the employers seem to agree by selecting the smarter candidates.

The one question that I have faced repeatedly by my students is—“If these skills are so important and crucial for young professionals, why is there no book written in easy English which is understandable by even those whose language level is not very good and which covers all the major aspects in ONE volume thus eliminating the need to read many books for overall development?”

This book was an answer to that question and three years on, since it was first published, continues to be so because the dynamics and the challenges of the job market in India remain primarily the same for aspiring candidates. If anything has changed, it is recruiters finding some newer methods of interviewing candidates. Most of these new identified trends have been included in this second edition.

It is written in easy English and covers all the basics required to jumpstart your career. It is divided in two parts. The first part holds your Preface hand through the entire selection procedure, right from pre-preparation to the final interview and the second part deals with laying a solid foundation for an attractive personality which will be yours for life. These are life lessons. If the lessons are understood, digested and adopted in daily practice through self-study, they will truly bring about magical results.

Tuhina Anukul Varshney