Career Growth Tips for Young Professionals from a General Manager

In this article, we will be sharing career growth tips from Bairy Venkata Ugendhar and following are the short introduction about him, before we start.

Bairy Venkata Ugendhar

GM – Industrial Engineering Operations | 28+ Years in Manufacturing

With over 28 years of hands-on experience across apparel, consulting, machine tools, and finance industries, Mr. Ugendhar is a recognized leader in Industrial Engineering and Operations Excellence. From setting up greenfield factories to driving digitization and lean transformation, his journey is a goldmine of insights for aspiring professionals.

In this exclusive conversation, he shares career-defining lessons, tips for young engineers, and how staying committed to excellence can lead to remarkable professional growth.

Since you are an experienced manufacturing professional, what is the advice for career growth to young professionals?

Young professionals are fortunate enough, as technologies are upgraded in all fields and they need to upgrade day by day as a kaizen through AI driven applications in their respective fields.

There will be paradigm shift in education compared to present where people know only medicine and engineering. They should convince their parents what they like and get guidance and persuade their dreams.

This is ok… But what about how to behave or ‘act’ inside an organization to get promotion or career growth…?

Few things to keep in mind when you are working in an organisation:

1. Be away from office gossips as they mislead your action.
2. Be adaptable to different types of bosses as each boss is unique in your journey take away good learnings from them and apply in your own style as each one is unique based on personality.
3. Be a good listener as this will help you to understand better to take action.
4. Do not get friendship in office relations as it damages both parties. Wear the hat of specific role as long as you are in work place which is win win for both organization and each individual.
5. Don’t procrastinate: Do not wait for perfection but rather take calculate risk and start working and take corrective action to make it still better which is the way of kaizen. Even 1% improvement per day will give compounding effect.
6. Don’t take action or decision based on opinions shared by people but rather ask for facts to act on.
7. Know about your KPI and work towards it and take feedback from boss on areas of improvement. This is a tip to get noticed and help to improve career growth and of course promotion.
8. Always go with value adding mindset which improve career and creates value in all aspects of life.
9. Do not lose temper and fall prey for Politics.
10. PATIENCE is the key to think and act.

What you have to say about office politics?

Where ever 2 people are there Politics come into picture and we need to weight whether that Politics are for good or bad. There will be people in organization who do Politics for their selfish motives. Need to be cautious with those people and learn how to navigate through them without getting prey.

Should be alert by knowing who is who by silent observation when you join the organization. Don’t get provoked by words of people. Listen, be patient and find facts before acting on. Through experiences and lessons one can navigate through office Politics.

Not one size fits all. Different people have different strength and weaknesses and each has to be patient and understand the situation and navigate with their strength to overcome bad office Politics.

What is office politics and how it should be?

Office Politics is the exercising of power and authority in a balanced manner, to align different sets of employees with different behaviors to organizational goals and individual goals, and to neutralize the negative politics to the maximum extent possible.

This is one should behave in office…. What all are the strategies to be adopted to get higher position or salary?

1. Update yourself with the latest trends in the industry
2. Be innovative and work on 3 Cs – Communication, Cooperation, and Coordination to be responsive.
3. Get cross-functional training to handle cross-functional tasks and be a part of cross-functional team.
4. Apart from routine tasks, do small projects one at a time to get improved results for the organization.
5. Keep good interpersonal relations with all departments which can indirectly add value to your work.
6. Keep abreast of updates from your friends and colleagues working in other organizations, to bring some value to your own organization.
7. Keep adding value to the organization and demand value for yourself to get promoted to next level and hikes in salary band.

After doing all this, if your organization do not notice your work, then go for a job change.