My First Job Podcast - Real Career Stories for India/Indian Freshers

H. Sriram is the Director at IBS Gulf Design, which he co-founded in 2009. His company is involved in the design of complex mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems in modern buildings that people never have to think about.

Starting off as a supervisory trainee in Voltas back in Chennai in 1985, Sriram has helmed projects in Abu Dhabi, Brunei, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia before he decided to strike out on his own in 2009. His work is highly technical and those in the building and construction industry know what it takes to design the internal systems of a building to keep it ticking. The company's client list includes some of the world's largest corporations.

How does one go about building a career in infrastructure development where huge sums of money are involved

#engineering #design #mep #mechanical #electrical #plumbing #airconditioning #projectmanagement

Andaleeb Wajid is a writer with a repertoire spanning young adult, romance and horror genres. Her early influences were, as she puts it, derived from a family of storytellers.

And she has eased into writing over 40 books in just 14 years. In a world where the cliche is that everyone has one book in them, Andaleeb has a stream inside her. And she taps into it with ease. What is her method? How did it come to define her life? And how does she keep finding the characters who dot her novels? This will be a conversation about how our careers find us, at times, instead of our searching for them. And Andaleeb riffing through the chapters in her life.

https://www.instagram.com/andaleebwajid/

#author #writer #career #job #romance #yougadult #horror #self-publishing

Kush Dhebar researches, studies and supervises excavations of ancient and medieval Indian sites of importance. His PhD was a study of the sculptures of grappling and pugilism of the Vijayanagara monuments.

Apart from archaeology, he is a wrestling enthusiast, which he thinks has built more mental than physical strengths in him. How did a student who couldn't focus on his school develop this set of diverse career interests? That's what this fascinating conversation is about.

Watch the original video episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/QT0MWdLb098

#careers #archeology #excavations #India #history

Ritesh Parakh is a foodie, a traveler and the co-founder of a baking brand in Chennai called Beyond Loaf. He's experimented with a career in jewelry besides other businesses but kept going back to his true calling.

So, how did a debater, a blogger and a qualified engineer find himself wading into a crowded market and build a name for quality and innovation?

Perhaps the clue is in the number of restaurants that he has sampled and has an opinion on - he's completely into the food scene in Chennai. With the gift of the written word, he has built a following, with short, pithy and snappy reviews.

But from writing about food to building a business around it is a completely different proposition

Matharani Mathias has helped shape people from diverse backgrounds for careers in the hospitality industry. She could have built a career and risen to the top of any luxury hotel. She had the intelligence and the drive to achieve it.

Instead, she been at the helm of a private hotel management college called Sarosh in the small town of Mangalore in Karnataka. Over the decades, she has created talent that found a place, not just in the hospitality industry but several other sectors as well.

Her story is about understanding that a career devoted to helping people achieve their potential can be rewarding fulfilling and drive up the standards in the industry

Aparna Chandrashekar has trained tens of thousands of people for IT companies in India. It's a skill that came to the fore when newly minted Indian companies had to scale rapidly to meet the new opportunities that opened up in the early 2000's from US outsourcing

Her linguistics abilities that served her well as a grammar teacher came handy for neutralizing regional accents and she found her purpose. She went on to manage client roles and responsibilities for revenue generation.

And then, she found that being a coach and helping successive generations is what she enjoys the most.

Listen to how a career defined by a trend created careers that changed the lives of thousands in India

Dr Srinivasan Periathiruvadi knew that starting a private, not for profit blood bank in India would be a daunting job. With Dr. Saranya, who joined him early on, he went ahead anyway in 1995.

It involved education, persuasion and maintaining uncompromising quality standards. Jeevan Blood Bank paved the way for testing and raising the quality of blood dispensed in the country. As well as getting the Indian Government to issue a gazette notification and make it a national policy.

He turned his attention to the problem of creating a Bone Marrow Registry in 2015 (https://www.bethecure.in/) to help those afflicted with cancer and thalassemia - and to find a match, ethnicity is a major factor. Apart from saving lives, Dr. Srinivasan is an avid traveler and photographer who has captured breathtaking frames from some of the most picturesque spots in the world. All proceeds from the exhibitions of these photos goes to support the foundations he has built. A man who believes in the goodness of humans and meets every challenge with a belief in finding solutions and solving intractable problems.

To know more about the stem cell registry, please write to: [email protected] Or visit the website: https://www.bethecure.in/

To see Dr. Srinivasan's portfolio of nature photographs and for any exhibition requests, please visit: https://www.natureimages.in

SHOW LESS

Karthik Thoguluva Krishnamoorthy planned a career in VFX — until a health condition changed everything. What started as a way to cure it became his calling: he's now a yoga teacher in Dubai. A career change India story about finding purpose you didn't choose. Hear it on My First Job.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Karthik Thoguluva Krishnamoorthy set out to build a career in VFX, a field he was genuinely passionate about — until a persistent health condition forced him to turn to yoga instead. In this episode, he talks about how a practice that started purely as a cure became the center of his life, and how he built a career as a yoga teacher in Dubai almost by chance, never having set out to pursue it.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN

• Why Karthik originally planned a career in VFX, and what he was passionate about in that path
• - How a persistent health condition became the unexpected turning point that redirected his career
• - Why yoga went from being merely a cure to becoming, in his words, the lodestar of his life
• - What it took to build a career as a yoga teacher in Dubai after starting from a completely different field
• - His reflections on accepting that forces beyond your control or understanding can end up guiding your career

TIMESTAMPS (approximate)

00:00 — Intro: from a VFX ambition to a career in yoga

03:06 — Karthik's original plan — a career in VFX

11:29 — The turning point: a health condition that changed everything

18:52 — The hard part: turning to yoga as a cure, without expecting it to become a career

27:27 — Building a career as a yoga teacher in Dubai

35:49 — Accepting forces beyond your understanding as guides in your career

39:19 — Closing thoughts

ABOUT KARTHIK THOGULUVA KRISHNAMOORTHY

Yoga teacher based in Dubai, specializing in Ashtanga yoga, with a background that also draws on Ayurveda.

Website: https://www.yogawithkarthik.com/

LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/karthik-thoguluva-krishnamoorthy-3054964

TOPICS

career change India, unconventional career, career pivot, yoga career, second career India, finding your calling

Subscribe to My First Job for more real career stories from Indian professionals. Find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and JioSaavn.

Vejay Anand graduated as a pharmacist but then, went into doing an MBA. Marriage, advertising and product marketing happened. He joined Cafe Coffee Day during its meteoric rise in India and put in systems and standard operating procedures to drive efficiencies.

He blew hot and cold, moving from coffee to beer. His love for teaching and writing led him down the path to becoming a brand historian and, on his blog, he has several stories for those who are interested - https://onlykutts.com/

Muralidharan Subramanian has sold instant coffee and milk powder in the hamlets of Bodhi and Theni in Tamil Nadu and Maggi Noodles on the streets of Hyderabad. He's sold franchises in the US, chocolates and tomato paste in Africa - and now, he's the Global Sales Head for smart parking solutions for a US based company.

Murali is the embodiment of the fluent fast-talking salesperson who sells with passion and belief. He loves crisscrossing cultures and learning new languages - and he has worked in over 60-70 countries.

He speaks of his love for the job, how his upbringing molded him and how his comfort zones stretched across the world