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Category: career

Thoughts on Skill

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

The word “Skill” gets used very casually these days.

It’s a Skills driven world. It’s about Skills. Skills over Degrees.

A skill is the ability to complete a set of tasks well.

In a workplace, people use their various skillsets to get a task done. A designer will use her/his design skills, knowledge, and experience to work on a website, app, or do design work. A training coordinator will use his/her training knowledge, skills, and experience to develop training programs and assessments. The college degree can help land the job but the skills learned and polished overtime will certainly help to accelerate your personal and professional growth.

With technology, devices and tools changing how we live, communicate, and work, professional skills will continue to be important and the differentiator between getting ahead and getting left behind in the workplaces.

Personal growth

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Personal growth is your responsibility.

Schools, colleges, and workplaces can help facilitate our personal, intellectual, social and professional growth. However, the main responsibility for our personal and professional growth is in our hands. With technology disrupting our daily lives and changing how/where/with/way we work, the continuous self learning is the key to remain competitive, relevant, and ahead in today’s world.

Schools, colleges, and workplaces can become a foundation for our growth but not the ultimate places.

Few places to get started or continue on your growth:

https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more

https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=free

https://www.udemy.com/topic/chatgpt/?price=price-free&sort=popularity

 

Giving feedback

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Giving feedback is both an art and science!

There are different ways to put the content together to give constructive feedback. Constructive feedback will combine both good/positive and negative/improvement areas of the person you are giving feedback to.

Several ways to provide feedback:

  1. Go through all the good/positive parts first and then cover the negative/improvement areas second
  2. Combine good/positive parts as well as negative/improvement areas
  3. Ask the person you’re giving feedback to on which one she/he like to hear first
  4. Use the feedback sandwich method (positive, negative, positive)

The feedback content is as important as the style, tone, and way you are providing feedback. Practice providing feedback with a colleague or a manager, reflect on where you can improve on providing feedback, and then deliver feedback frequently to become a skilled feedback giver.

Excellent Work Quality

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

For our work quality to be excellent, we have to focus on more than the work itself.

To get the most out of your focused time at work or craft, we need to get plentiful rest, energy, and “intentional” time away from work. If you feel the most productive in the mornings, you should do your important and high priority work in the morning times. You can take care of the not as important or other priority tasks in the second half of the day. Likewise, if you feel the most productive in the evenings, you should do the important and high priority work in the evening times and do the not as important or other priority tasks in the first half of the day. You organize your day based on how you work best!

In addition, finding and doing recreational activities beyond our work enables us to be more energized and creative when we get back to the work again. Great creative ideas can sometimes come when you’re moved away from work or not thinking about work all the time. Natural sunlight, walks, music, arts, healthy food, meaningful relationships, and many more contribute to producing excellent work quality.

How do you bring about the best version of yourself everyday?

Required course for high schools and colleges

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

An important course that’s urgently required and needed in high schools and colleges is Lifelong Skills.

The Lifelong Skills course will cover why certain skills are important no matter what career a student chooses to pursue after their academic years, how to build productive habits for personal and professional growth, and why no matter what educational degree someone holds, gaining skills will be a lifelong journey. Skills will take students and professionals further in their career than talent alone!

Certain skills are valuable lifelong skills: communication, listening, writing, creative, team work, curiosity, authenticity, personal finance management, selling, teaching, coaching, learning, reading, adaptability to name some. If we become aware of these skills and sharpen them early in our professional journey, we will be better suited and authentically successful in the dynamic world that we live in. Technology will continue to become better, faster, cheaper and the more we hone our “human” skills, the better prepared we will be.

Besides the academic subjects we teach in high schools and colleges, it’s high time that we teach students Lifelong Skills and cover the basics to get them ready for the next chapter in their academic and professional careers.

Characteristics for Excellent Customer Success

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

No matter what industry, product/service your company sells, your company stage and more, there are certain characteristics that are foundational to providing excellent customer success.

Empathy.

Care.

Positive Attitude.

Proactive.

Creative.

Open minded.

Organized.

Team work.

Flexible.

What more would you like to add?

 

 

Productive work days

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Each work day can feel the same yet be so different.

Monday comes around, meetings and more meetings, and then we’re already planning for the weekend and beyond.

To make our working hours count and make our days productive, we can start our days with intention and finish with learnings and reflections from the work day.

What’s our intention today? Intentions could be I want to become better at doing client presentations or I want to learn more about Generative AI through meaningful discussions with colleagues. The intention helps set a goal for the day.

What did we learn today? We can learn a lot in a given day. We don’t have to be enrolled in a course or a seminar for us to learn something new each day. At the end of the work day, we can take a few minutes to write down what we learned today and reflect on how the day went.

 

Work from home/office

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Once upon a time on a weekday, people got up, got ready, and commuted to a physical work location.

That was the “normal” work routine in many places globally.

On Monday morning, individuals got ready, had breakfast at home/in their commute to work, worked for 8 hours, and then returned home. Same routine for 5 days a week. 2 day weekend and long weekends on certain holidays. Lots of time and money spent on commuting to and from work. How productive this “system/structure” has been is up for debate. Working from home was way less common than it is today.

These days, individuals get up, get ready, and work from their home work station all 5 days of the week or commute few times to their physical work location or still commute 5 days a week. A hybrid work model seems to be here to stay and both employees and employers benefit from this.

Useful college workshops

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Workshops that could provide tremendous value to current college students especially after they graduate are:

Financial Management

Priority Management

Skills Development

Health and Fitness

Leadership

Networking

Beauty of Simplicity

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo da Vinci

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it’s very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand. – Bill Buford

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is. – Bruce Lee

Productive from home

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

How will the current and future of work look like? Is the hybrid work model here to stay?

Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration for Pitt Business, and Yuye Ding, a Ph.D. student in Katz Graduate School of Business, looked at Standard and Poor’s 500 firms — the largest companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges — that had implemented return to work mandates, forcing employees to be in the office five days a week.

The results from the research study showed that while many of the companies said they were bringing employees back to the office to improve the bottom line, there were no significant changes in financial performance or firm values after the mandates were implemented. However, there was a sharp decrease in employees’ job satisfaction.

To keep employees’ happy and still maintain strong financial performance, companies should be more flexible and allow employees to work from home depending on their work nature, product/service, customers, industry etc. If productivity, work quality, and financial performance are not being negatively impacted by employees working from home, companies should allow employees work from home flexibility and provide support to them.

Marketing or Product development – Which first?

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Should you develop your product first or start marketing the idea first?

If the idea has some legs to become a business, building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) first could help. Once you’ve build an MVP, you can test it out with potential customers. Collect feedback from early users of your product/service and continue developing it to create the best value to your product/service users. Marketing the product/service once you’ve built a user base would be prudent.

Product development and marketing will go hand in hand overtime. In the initial stages, product development should be prioritized over marketing. An excellent product/service will always be easier to market!

The Great Nepali Diaspora (TGND) Networking Event on May 2

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Join us at The Great Nepali Diaspora networking event in Buffalo, NY on Thursday, May 2.

The Great Nepali Diaspora (TGND) is a community of exceptional global Nepali talent that aims to nurture connection, collaboration, and camaraderie to create impact at scale. TGND is a non-profit organization registered under Article 501 (c) 3 in the state of New Jersey in the United States.

To register for the May 2 event, please visit this link: https://partiful.com/e/0f2Ywi2TtXP4yXM3j2Vt

The long drought in team engagement

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

A company, WeAreGrowing Inc. decides to add several new team members to its company. They place ads, go through job sites, and recruiters to find and interview the best talent to join their growing company. Lots of time, human resources, and energy goes into finding the right candidate(s) for the roles and after several interview(s), the team members are selected and officially onboarded into the company.

For the new team members, the first few days and weeks are exciting at WeAreGrowing Inc. As the weeks and months go by, these new team members are not “new” anymore and become “regular employees.” As WeAreGrowing Inc. continues to grow, they add more new team members and so on. Sometime in the distant future, few team members decide to leave WeAreGrowing Inc. for various reasons – join another company, higher studies, start their own venture, etc. Then WeAreGrowing Inc. become highly alert on the recent layoffs and in a move to not lose the team members plans to meet them. HR and managers talk to the team members about how much the company values them and promises that the company will continue to grow. Yet the team members share that their plans to move on were made months ago and felt that their personal and professional growth was stagnant for sometime and were not growing at WeAreGrowing Inc.

There seems to be a long drought in team engagement between when new team members join a company and when they decide to leave. A company can convince itself that they did whatever they can at their disposal to keep the team member(s) engaged and growing. However, team members feel that the company did not engage them enough or challenge them enough or show tangible growth during the time they were with the company. Addressing the team engagement issues when the team members are almost out the door is too late!

If a company sincerely believes that the team is their biggest asset, then they should treat them as such – keep them engaged and challenged throughout the team members’ journey within the company. It’s more expensive for companies to find and hire new talent than keeping the current talent engaged and productive. Better for the company to approach their people that they can leave at any point and realize that the team members have many other career choices as well. You (HR, Managers, Founders or Leaders) just have to deliver the message and show that staying with the company is the best career choice for the team members!

Underrated : Thoughts on the documentary

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

I finished watching the Stephen Curry : Underrated documentary on Apple TV.

The documentary tells of almost a fairy tale like story of how Stephen Curry who was overlooked throughout his basketball journey (high school, college, early NBA years) to ultimately becoming a 4 time NBA champion (so far). Stephen’s journey to the NBA was filled with challenges and underestimations. However, he kept going, working on his game, and continued to reach newer heights.

Stephen had a lot of people helping him on his basketball journey – family, coaches, team members, and the community. He emphasized how important his Davidson coach, Bob McKillop and his Davidson team members were critical to his confidence and growth on the basketball court especially in his early years at Davidson.

It’s an incredible sports documentary and highly recommend watching it for Stephen Curry fans as well as for any sports fan.

Silicon Peaks

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Pukar C. Hamal, Founder and CEO of SecurityPal, recently coined the term Silicon Peaks to capture the growing startup ecosystem of Nepal.

On his LinkedIn page, Pukar wrote that “The Himalayas have always been a source of inspiration for me. And given that 8 out of the worlds 14 highest mountains are located here including the highest (Mt. Everest) and the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th(!) highest, it only felt natural to pay homage to the incredible Peaks we have here! And thus ?️*Silicon Peaks* ?️ was born!”

Silicon Peaks is here and will continue to grow! #SiliconPeaks

Engaging Company Culture

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Engaging company cultures have empowered, creative, and growth oriented team members leading company culture events. Through empowerment, employees are given the decision making authority and independence to decide what activities bring out the best in the team. Through creativity, employees can be resourceful and come up with activities that are out of the box and meaningful for the team. Through a focus on growth-oriented activities, employees can initiate programs that integrate both learning and fun.

What’s your company culture like?

More Art than Science

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

With AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, the possibilities seem endless. In fact, it has made it very easy for us in various professions to go to ChatGPT, write a prompt, and get a good output in a span of seconds. With ChatGPT, we can have a solid starting point for an email to a client, a college essay, speech or anything that ChatGPT can help you with.

This means that the ART part is becoming more important and will continue to do so in the future. If every sales person or customer success manager in the company goes to ChatGPT to help them write emails, almost all will start to sound alike (if there’s no personalization done). If every student in the classroom goes to ChatGPT to help them write an essay, almost all will start to sound alike (if there’s no personalization done). And the list goes on.

Our creativity, personality, uniqueness, authentic experiences, and human emotions are where we create meaningful connections with others in the world we live in today. Bring your authentic self to the work that you do and have that human connection. Let AI take care of the rest!

when you’re ready for fishing

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Heard it many times. Seems like a valid point of view right?

That is if the man is ready to fish or wants to learn how to fish, then it becomes an empowering journey. Without the awareness that fishing is important or is an important lifelong skill to learn, it won’t take people closer to their goals and vision. You won’t go too far with a person who just wants a fish on a plate or happy to have something easy served up all the time!

How about “Give a man a fish, and you feed his appetite now; teach a man who is hungry enough to learn how to fish and you feed his motivation and empower him for a lifetime.”

Want to become better at…?

Posted on by Nirmal Thapa

Want to be a better writer? keep writing.

Want to be a better storyteller? keep telling stories.

Want to be a better leader? keep leading.

Want to be a better creative? keep getting creative.

Want to be better negotiator? keep negotiating.

Want to be a better coach? keep coaching.

Want to be a better teacher? keep teaching.

Want to be a better manager? keep managing.

Want to be a better mentor? keep mentoring.

Want to be better skilled at any craft? Keep at it.

Prioritize and work on the craft that you want to become the best in the world at.

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