Strengths Workshop for Career Development by Mr. Ganesh Ramakrishnan

The Corporate Relations Committee, SIMSREE organized a workshop on “Strengths Workshop for Career Development” on January 5, 2014 for the first year students. The workshop was conducted by Mr. Ganesh Ramakrishnan who is Senior Director, Human Resources at Oracle Financial Services Software Ltd. He has spent over 24 years in the IT industry in various areas of the business including software development, product architecture, quality management, pre-sales and relationship management. In recent years he has conducted workshops on strengths approach for career development under the aegis of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and HR Infotech Association.

Mr. Ramakrishnan began by giving us an overview on what exactly is the Strengths Approach. It is an innovative and practical tool for helping one with one’s career planning and development over one’s lifelong journey. It provides useful guidelines that are based on research, to identify areas to attain excellence. The workshop involved lots of interesting activities that were done by each participant individually and in groups, to aid self-exploration and self-understanding.

While tracing the path to excellence, he made the citation from the movie ‘3 Idiots’ – ‘Don’t run after Success, run after Excellence, success will follow you’. Building on one’s strengths helps one to achieve excellence. Strength is not having some attribute or ability. In strengths’ approach, strength is a consistent, outstanding performance using the abilities that one is good at or those in which one has a natural preference. Any job requires numerous competencies but if one were to aspire to achieve excellence in all of them one would end up with excelling in none. Mr Ramakrishnan illustrated this with the example of people with outstanding performance in various fields. He emphasized that their excellence stands out in some areas but their performance in other areas is average.

Talents, skills and knowledge are components that make up strengths. Mr. Ramakrishnan elucidated how to identify one’s dominant talents. He stressed that one should be sincere and honest with one’s inner-self and pointed up that self-awareness is a lifelong journey. He expressed that ‘Fixing Weakness is damage control and damage control is not the path to Excellence’. We should overcome them to the extent that we do our job well. But there could still be things that one may find difficult or unpleasant despite the efforts. One should work around our weaknesses and retain enough time to build on one’s strengths.

The entire workshop was extremely interactive and quite unique in terms of the learning methodology.
We all, at SIMSREE are indeed thankful to Mr Ganesh Ramakrishnan for sharing his valuable insights through such an interesting workshop.