My First Job Podcast

What does a career in Psychology, UX/UI Design, or Digital Marketing actually look like in India today?

In this episode of My First Job, we reverse the format and speak to three young professionals who are building modern careers in fast-growing industries:

If you're a student wondering about:

If you are in your 20s trying to figure out what a career is supposed to look like, this conversation will reset how you think.

Commodore G. Prakash shares career advice for 20s India that goes far beyond any job portal or campus placement tip.

→ How the discipline of naval service becomes a competitive edge in the corporate world

→ What his very first posting taught him about leadership — before he knew he was being tested

→ Why making decisions under pressure in the Navy is the best training for a business career → The one pi...

# Inside the Cockpit: A Fighter Pilot's Unfiltered Story

Rarely does someone pull back the curtain on military aviation with such raw honesty. In this episode, a fighter pilot with over 3,000 hours of flight experience walks us through what it truly takes to wear the wings, from basic landings all the way to executing precision strikes under nine times your body weight in G-force.

Can you imagine landing a damaged aircraft near Chennai on pure instinct and split-second judgment? That harrowing story alone makes this episode worth your time. The pilot covers...

Rarely does a career span from commanding troops in active conflict zones to advising a global tech giant on cybersecurity strategy, but that is exactly what Colonel KPM Das has done.

His journey from joining India's National Defence Academy at just 16 years old to becoming National Cybersecurity Advisor at Cisco is genuinely remarkable.

In this episode, Das reflects on how the Academy's demanding structure (40 percent dedicated to physical training alone) forged a resilience that carried him through decades of service. He describes being posted to Nagaland and Manipur in 1979 during a...

From Marketing to Public Speaking: Understanding Consumer Behavior Beyond the Numbers

# From Beer Sales to Berlin (Sort Of): One Speaker's Winding Path

Rarely does mishearing a job destination lead to one of the most formative experiences of a career. Vinay Pushpakaran thought he was heading to Berlin, Germany, only to land in Benin, West Africa, where he discovered that markets, like people, require genuine understanding before they reveal their secrets.

What does it actually take to build a career around speaking the customer's language?

Three Creatives, Three Unexpected Paths

Rarely does a single conversation capture such genuinely diverse creative journeys, but episode 31 of "My First Job" delivers exactly that, and then some.

Yashwin Senanayake, who pivoted from music to marketing, recently completed a three-year documentary about an 86-year-old pioneering fashion figure from Sri Lanka, collaborating with the Australian High Commission and Curtin University. The film is currently screening at the National Museum. Meanwhile, Aishwarya Subramanian discovered her love for pastry-making after years in industrial design, building her craft through consistent practice during COVID lockdown before...

Most regular veterinarians spend their time around dogs and cats, but unusual things can happen. And this was Dr. Barani's experience.

Lions in the local zoo had caught Covid and volunteers were required to care for them. It's not as if Covid was not already causing havoc.

Here, the problems were multifold. As Dr. Barani says: We had some 12 lions who tested positive for COVID. The lions come under a family called cats. C -A -T -S. Big cats. Right. Okay. Actually, felines. So, like how a cat gets COVID virus. the lion can also...

There was a time when Google and Facebook were startups. There were people who believed in them. And understood their potential early on.

Being a venture capitalist is for those who like taking big risks for big payoffs. Or understanding markets so well, that you see the possibilities that no one else has seen - yet.

Divya Sampath has a career path that converged with the internet boom in the mid-90s. And she saw things change faster than the gigabyte speeds that would soon be taken for granted.

Rarely does someone sign...

If you're one of those rare people who want to work in the social sector, this episode is for you

Rajasri started with a goal to impact one million people—her company has already reached over two million across India and Saudi Arabia. The founder of Impactree.ai is revolutionizing social impact measurement through technology, building SaaS platforms that help ground-level workers translate sustainability goals into real metrics.

From growing up in the Gulf to abandoning Indian Economic Services midway (she later completed a CS degree in her first attempt), Rajasri's jo...

Most urban jobs involve dealing with air, water, and environmental pollution on a daily basis. What if you spend all your life in scenic surroundings? But the work is rigorous and you have to deal with much slower pace of life

Starting at just twenty years old, Ramesh Vasudevan turned down India's defense services for something entirely different: tea plantations. His first assignment? Pruning two hundred tea bushes in fifteen days at Mayfield plantation in the Nilgiris. (He thought he'd done well, but his supervisor had other ideas.) That harsh feedback became the foundation of his entire...

Finding Your Own Stage: One Man's Journey from Banking to the Spotlight

When Surajit Guha walked into his boss's office to discuss his weekend singing gigs, he wasn't sure what to expect. Born in Kolkata in 1963 but raised in Chennai, Surajit had been balancing two worlds—corporate trainer by day, professional performer by night. His boss's response? Go ahead and pursue both paths.

For thirty-five years, Surajit navigated careers in sales, banking at ANZ Bank in Australia, and training at NIIT before finally taking the leap into music full-time. (He'd been si...

Young Professionals Redefine Career Success Through Experimentation

Starting with a bold shift, this 25th episode features three accomplished young people who discovered their paths by eliminating what didn't work rather than following predetermined plans. Deepika Ganesh, Aryaman Harish, and Aditi Battu share how they navigated education for sustainable development, data analytics, and immunology—not through linear trajectories, but through intentional exploration.

What happens when you reject medicine despite family pressure? Aditi pursued a liberal arts degree, sampling subjects from molecular biology to gastronomy before finding her direction. (Her unconventional combination proved remarkably effective.) Aryaman created an...

In this podcast I share my journey of becoming a banker's boss and how I secured a relationship manager position in the amazing world of relationship banking! 🌟 If you're interested in pursuing a career in banking and finance or are simply curious about what it takes to thrive as a relationship manager, this video is for you. Join me as I explore the key skills, qualifications, and strategies required to break into this lucrative field. I’ll discuss the critical role of relationship managers in banking, how they build and maintain client relationships, and the impact they have on a ban...

From Corporate to Entrepreneur: Jaya's Journey to Revolutionize Banking

Here are the notes summarizing the key points from the podcast summary: - Jaya Janardhanan left her corporate banking career to start her own company, Krayontek Solutions, aimed at helping banks streamline operations and adapt to changes in the industry. - Jaya shares her journey from joining a bank after graduating to transitioning from corporate banking to retail banking, learning new skills like Demat operations on the job. - She describes helping establish centralized operations for ICICI Bank, streamlining manual processes and deciding which tasks to keep at...

From Banker to Healer: Soumya's Journey in Mental Health and Addiction Treatment

Soumya, the head of therapy and operations at TTK Hospitals, shares her unconventional journey from banking to mental health and addiction treatment. Despite societal stigma, she found her calling in this field, driven by her passion for helping others. Her days are unpredictable, managing crises, assisting patients, and ensuring smooth operations at the rehabilitation center

The speaker initially planned to follow their father's footsteps in HR but discovered a passion for social work, particularly medical and psychiatric care. Their experience with community work...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Karthik Thoguluva thought he'd make a career in VFX, something he was passionate about. But a persistent health condition forced him to turn to Yoga. And that's where he found both meaning and deliverance.

What started merely as a way to cure the condition became the lodestar of his life. It was as if he found his calling almost by chance - because if it wasn't for the health problem, he may have never pursued Yoga.

The conversation covers what it means to accept and acknowledge that there are forces beyond your understanding that may...

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...

Gayathri Nayagam has a master's in international business. And at a point in her life, she wanted to work at Jebel Ali's Free Trade Zone. She fell in love, got married and moved to the small temple town of Thenkasi in South India, where her husband's family had a decades-old business.

Gayathri has a practical streak and a work ethic that helped her get through some of the most difficult stretches in her life. In a free-wheeling conversation, she talks of how a South Indian girl who didn't know a word of Hindi survived in Muzaffarnagar., where...

Deepika Sharma runs a boutique architecture company called D Plus Y, along with her husband Yogi. They manage several projects, big and small, together.

Deepika comes from a family of doctors, but she was quite sure that practicing medicine was not her goal in life. She enjoyed sketching and her father decided that Architecture would be a good professional option - and it was!

Deepika talks about how she evolved in her career, what keeps her interested and wehy she would not want to do anything else.

Dr Alby Anand Kurian has had a multifaceted career in marketing theory and practice, which is quite rare. He's taught at Universities in India and across the world, including in Singapore, New York and UK. He's currently Senior Faculty at Exeter University in the UK.

Apart from Reality Plus, there are several other papers he has published on Marketing theory. So is Affordable Risk where he explains how taking risks doesn't have to mean putting everything on the line. Learn how to take calculated and affordable risks to achieve success, even if you have responsibilities and a...

Poornima Shenoy illustrates how comprehensive policy, backed by a talented team of industry leaders, helped companies enter the Indian semiconductor industry.

She knew the power of taking risks and embrace new opportunities after assessing what exactly needed to be done.

She also speaks of how her early upbringing ensured that she never put limits on her abilities or her imagination - and how men turned out to be her best mentors

Vishwadeep Kuila initially graduated in dairy technology and even got his first job in a dairy plant. But cracking the CAT exam and landing up at IIT Ahmedabad changed everything and made him a lifelong practitioner of marketing.

He speaks of what it took to build a career in advertising, followed by 13 years spent in marketing at GM Pens - the Indian company behind Reynolds. And how he brought professionalism into an entrepreneurial company.

Listen to how chance encounters lead to greater understanding - apart from the work required to fight the odds.

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Neha Parashar has had a long and successful career in HR and recruitment. She has built this into a powerful coaching approach helping senior professionals advance and navigate their careers

She speaks of the importance of maintaining a career inventory to track experiences, accomplishments, and challenges. Learn how to collect and journal your career moments and gain clarity and sincerity of a professional journey. Take away valuable insights for career growth.

#SuccessfulCareerTips #CareerInventory #ProfessionalJourney #CareerMoments #PersonalDevelopment #CareerGrowth #ProfessionalSuccess #CareerTips #Achievements

After completing an MA in Economics and a PG Diploma in Advertising, Narayan Kumar's first stop was as a writer in Shilpi Advertising. From there to working on campaigns for some of the largest brands in the country to learning programming was a creative leap. Along with rediscovering an old love - the classical guitar. Interesting people make interesting career moves.

Enlightened companies like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Godrej, and Tata have processified their advertising briefs to streamline the creative process. Discover the system of evaluating and appraising creative ideas, as well as the internal approvals involved.

Usha Krishnamoorthy's career as a Career Psychologist was more about taking chances than pure intent. Before that she tried her hand at several things Skills #TherapeuticExperience #ProfessionalDevelopment #TherapyTechniques #EnhancingTherapy #ClientWellbeing #TherapySuccess

Earlier, she worked with Chennai Volunteers, an organization connecting volunteers with NGOs and individuals in need. and taught English.

Lalita Iyer has had a long and successful career as a journalist. She was Principal Correspondent at The Week magazine and spent years at Eeenadu. She has written about everything from beauty to politics to wellness.

She shares her inspiring path from a top student to a successful journalist. The steps that led to her dream career, and find inspiration for your own journey. #StudentToJournalist #UnexpectedJourney #DreamCareer #SuccessStory #Motivation #Inspiration #PersonalGrowth #JournalismTips #CareerPath

She was one of the early women breaking barriers in journalism and uncovering issues of women's welfare and development. Join us as...

Gautam Sivaraman, Chief Delivery Officer, Access Healthcare started out on his first job thinking it would be for life. Little did he know about the twists and turns that lay ahead. It wasn't just about coping but coming out on top.

Discover how India's BPO industry has transformed over the years, embracing complex processes and diverse talent. Learn about the high-skilled resources in call centers and coding, and the niche skills required for success. #BPOIndustryEvolution #IndiaBPO #NicheSkills #CallCenterSkills #CodingSkills #HighSkilledResources #IndustryTransformation #TalentDiversity #BusinessProcessOutsourcing

PG Subramanian, COO of Amnet Systems speaks of his career experiences and the decisions he made. It gives young people points to ponder when transitioning from studying to seeking a career.

He started off in the 50 degree heat of the shopfloor in a factory but that did not deter him from pursuing his next project. As he says - salary was never the primary motivation. There was a hunger to learn which served me well