Your first job sets the tone for the rest of your career. Here’s what our Co-founder & Chief Product Officer Rati Shetty had to say about her first job experience.
Job experiences teach you many things beyond polishing your skill-sets. These learnings tend to be your guidelines for the coming times in personal and professional life. The ‘My First Job’ section captures this essence from the industry leaders. Here is an account from Rati Shetty, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, BankBazaar.com
Additional Reading: Getting Candid With Rati Shetty
My First Job was:
Marketing Intern in Kraft Foods, Taipei, Taiwan.
My experience :
My first year of working in Taipei exposed me to some very valuable soft learnings, which ranked higher than technical skills which can be picked up anywhere. I was far out of my comfort zone, where I had to learn a new language to communicate in an environment with very different cultural nuances. I learned sensitivity and empathy at work, especially in regards to differences that transcend pure work. Working in an unfamiliar, foreign environment made me expect the unexpected and be prepared for anything.
Learn about these 10 Super Simple Money Lessons Mothers Can Teach Their Kids from Rati Shetty!
Things I learnt:
Aside from a new language, I gained a lot in terms of soft learnings such as the importance of EQ at the workplace – being empathetic and sensitive, especially to differences that go beyond pure work and other cultural nuances that one is not familiar with.
Skills I acquired:
Being analytical and data oriented as data is a sure-fire way to make better decisions and save on costs. I learned that the details really mattered via my analytical assignments.
Making failures process fixes – If something breaks, do not be disheartened. Take it as a learning and build something stronger and better.
The importance of a customer-first approach – The ability to place myself in a customer’s shoes helps with making better decisions and building sharper solutions.
Read more from Rati Shetty here.
My manager’s teaching:
My manager taught me the importance of every detail & that they mattered.
My journey so far:
Nothing short of incredible. The learning has been stupendous, and I have been lucky to have crossed paths with some of the best and brightest, most talented and driven people, who just spur me on to get better at what I do and push myself further than before.
Turning point in my career:
Starting a company where every day is a new learning, brings with it new challenges, and solving them creatively to get closer to the end goal of enabling better product experiences for more and more customers in our domain.
My most crucial step/assignment
I found that requests were ad-hoc, coming in in a very disparate manner from different geographies and teams, in a very disorganised fashion. It was a crucial part assigned to me to track. I built a form to facilitate easy project request management across offices, across the world for the Kraft International Export business. I realised that Kraft’s internal tools could be adapted for the internal teams and used that framework to ensure compliance across geographies within the intranet and presented this to my team for adoption.
My advice:
Hard work is the only path to success. Have a vision and strive relentlessly towards it. You will make mistakes. But view unexpected outcomes or failure as a chance to learn. Never give up.
Where I see myself 5 years from here:
I wish to look back and feel great about the impact that we at Team BankBazaar have had on the way society at large and the youth of the country look at Finance – that it is not so complicated, that it is not rocket science – enabling them to make better and smarter financial decisions easily because we made it absolutely frictionless, accessible and an integral, essential element in everyone’s life.
Rati Shetty shares her thoughts on How To Accumulate A Crore.
Disclaimer: This article first appeared on TimesJobs, Jobs & Careers.
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