By Milind Kher, Mumbai: Initial phase of career or first job can make or break someone’s whole professional life. Freshers face multiple challenges when they suddenly enter the corporate world after completing academic courses where campus life is generally cool and full of excitement. In the corporate life, they are new where they have to face competition to remain in the race, perform to improve skills for career advancements, manage time and task to achieve work-life balance. In this entire process, Emotional Intelligence (EI) plays a great role in shaping careers of freshers. Leveraging Emotional Intelligence techniques, job seekers can drive their career goals.
Why is Emotional Intelligence particularly important for freshers? Freshers have yet to demonstrate their domain knowledge yet to demonstrate their technical proficiency. They need to be able to establish themselves to be able to do that. And that is where Emotional Intelligence plays a critical part.
We define EI as the ability to recognize, understand and manage our own emotions – recognize, understand and influence the emotions of others.
Whereas IQ is important, when robust recruitment processes are used, all those that get taken on board are of a similar IQ. The EI can differ, and this is one factor that confers a distinct competitive edge. For ensuring compliance and cooperation from colleagues, as well as for getting ahead in the work place, EI plays a role that even exceeds that of IQ.
What does Emotional Intelligence consist of? Looked at broadly, there are five clusters which it is made up of. 1 > Self Awareness 2 >Self Regulation 3 > Motivation 4 > Empathy 5 > Social Skills.
The first two are internal, the third relates to self as well as to others whereas the last two refer to others. While motivation of others as well as empathy and social skills will come into play once the person joins the job, self awareness, self regulation and self motivation are things that each person needs to internally develop.
It helps them to win the people at the workplace over to their side, to be able to achieve the kind of rapport that will make the people want to cooperate with them and help them. This is something that is particularly important at the beginning of the career, especially as it then sets the pace for the rest of their tenure at that place. And since it shapes their mindset, it is not restricted to that place alone, it goes with them wherever they go.
When people join freshly, understanding others as well as service orientation, both being components of the empathy cluster, play an important role. These are indicators of the lateral power that they will wield, something that they gather on their own merits and not based on hierarchy
Social skills will become more important as they spend more time in the organization, and as they move up. Nevertheless it is always better to acquire these skills in advance, and when they join the organization there might already be some junior where the use of such skills can come in handy.
Freshers definitely need to make Emotional Intelligence a priority for themselves as this is positively going to have a direct impact on their success and growth.
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About the Author: Milind Kher is completely devoted to training. He has expertise is all kinds of soft skills training and his core competencies are Communication Skills and Mind Sciences, which include Emotional Intelligence and NLP. He is based in Mumbai and heading Hospitality Quorum, a training and business consulting company.