Spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation key for successful career

By Infodea News Network (INN), Bangalore;

“If you are looking to make a successful career, focus on three aspects, understanding of emerging technologies, a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation” said Mr. K. Pandiarajan, Minister for Tamil Official Language and Tamil Culture.
Addressing the conclave on “How to gain from India’s demographic dividend-The Way Forward” at Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Thandalam, organised to commemorate the institution’s 20 years of academic excellence recently, Mr. Pandiarajan said that with new digital technologies impacting life and business, today’s youth should not stop with skilling or re-skilling but need to look at their career differently, emphasising on entrepreneurship and attitude.
“Organised jobs in industry sectors are coming down due to rise of technologies such as social, mobile, analytics, cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT). Many traditional jobs are getting automated or replaced by machines, but a study by the London School of Business showed that huge job opportunities are being created in creative and culture arts,” he said.
He noted that ideas had become the most valuable input for business today. Venture capitalists are today changing their outlook and are prepared to invest in the right ideas in the right business models. This means a powerful idea like what Mark Zuckerberg did as a college student (to create social media platform-Facebook whose content is generated by 2.5 billion people across the globe) is now enjoying huge valuation if one such idea could create such a revolution, youth today should realise the power of ideas and innovative thinking. Even if a student wants to enter a job in an innovative company the recruiters look for their attitude and entrepreneur spirit.
Thus students should marry their aspirations to career goals not merely by skilling or re-skilling. What is needed is a re-perspectivisation about where they will emphasise idea creation, creative arts, attitude and entrepreneurial spirit. This will help them find long term career, he added.
Mr. G K Vasan, former Union Minister for Shipping inaugurated the “REC Tech Lounge” – a large computing facility, along with Mr Pandiarajan. The former shipping minister said that besides offering a degree or a certificate of knowledge accomplishments, colleges have to provide a set of skills that young people need to get into jobs, for higher education, to become entrepreneurs, or become teachers. He former minister also stressed the need to certify those skills separately at different levels based on the kind of tasks. He said that a student who has completed an engineering or a technology, a science or an arts degree, can accomplish be it writing, creativity, or build something which needs to be quantified through a clear graded certificate. “Education today is no longer confined to books. Today education is about inquiry it is about finding acceptable answers. It is about conflict resolution. It is about taking people’s mind to a higher plane through a process of study, research, enquiry, values and attitudes,” Mr Vasan added.
T Manikandan, Director (Engineering), Amazon Development Center India, also highlighted some industry trends especially where technologies seemed to take away traditional jobs. “When we say machines are taking over human jobs, we also should realize we need more people to write the code that drives these smart machines. This is where the job requirements are changing. We look for ability to do hard work but with a leadership thinking; deep skilling (deep knowledge and skills about particular domains, which is different from the breadth of knowledge that university curriculum provides) and self – confidence,” he said.
Dr ThangamMeganathan, Chairperson, Rajalakshmi Institutions said that about 16,000 students have passed out from the institution and were contributing to society.
Dr. C.R. Muthukrishnan, Advisor, Rajalakshmi Institutions and DrS.N. Murugesan, Principal of the college were also present.Past principals, long term serving teaching and non-teaching staff were felicitated during the celebration.