“My current job limits me to learn new things and hence I am looking out for a change” — is the single most popular answer I hear from the candidates seeking a job with us.
The current job doesn’t limit your learning, whatever you do in your 8–9 hours job is to make the company/project/role successful. It doesn’t and shouldn’t limit your desires to learn. The onus of learning always resides with us. There are two streams of learning one needs to take care of 1)which helps succeed in the current role, 2)which one desire to be doing in the next few months. If you are getting a job with the same knowledge what you use in your current job, then more or less the next job is also going to be the same.
As an interviewer, I am more interested in what other stuff you have learned apart from your 9–5 job, any new technology, new skills etc. What has been your learning journey? What challenges you faced and how you overcame? For sure, you have to be good at what you know but at the same time, you also need to show that you are willing to learn and are invested in your own career. Off late companies are more biased to hire a passionate worker, than a regular folk with the same knowledge but no passion.
A piece of advice to all the folks who would be attending an interview in near future — don’t hesitate to ask for your feedback. A person interviewing you has probably spoken to many candidates before you and would roughly help you know
- where you are relatively placed
- what skills you lack
- where you can improvise
- where the industry is heading in terms of technology
- what is expected out of x years of experience candidate etc?
My personal understanding is that an interview is not a one-way process, we (as a company) shouldn’t be selfish enough to just find who we are looking for, invest only in them and to the rest of the world just say a NO.
We have to help get those people up to the mark who we are not hiring, it shouldn’t be a choice but our duty to help improvise them.
Happy Reading !!
Nishant Verma (CEO, TestVagrant Technologies)
