AMP conducts Nationwide Employability Training Programme ‘Interview Crackathon’

Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP) conducts Nationwide Employability Training Programme (ETP) ‘Interview Crackathon’ by renowned trainer and senior HR Consultant, Mr. Tanveer Ahmed from February 13-25, 2017.
Association Muslim Professionals (AMP) has started a nation-wide campaign named Employability Training Program (ETP) covering 13 cities and 2100 students in 6 states. The students were from different streams of education – Engineering, Arts, Science and Education Training. The training was more of a workshop module that was covered and not just as a lecture series. This initiative was conducted in order to increase the percentage of youth who are fit for employment. The graduates who come of out colleges lack lot of interview skills that are required to crack an interview. This initiative was to address the challenges of facing and cracking an interview.
The Journey
The initiative was done across the country by the trainer, Tanveer Ahmed, who travelled to all the places all by himself doing programs every day. He started the journey from the nation’s capital – Delhi. The experience with Delhi crowd was amazing since the program was kicked off from a university campus with vibrant set of students to deal with. The journey then continued to Faridabad which was again conducted at a university level. The crowd was energetic and had great points to discuss in the workshop. The next stop was Jodhpur, Rajasthan where we had students from arts and science background who were curious enough to spend extra time to learn more about interview skills even after the workshop was over. At Indore, the crowd had good questions related to career planning and had the deep quest for learning. At Bhopal, we had mixed crowd of students from Arts, Science, Engineering and Pharmacy. The crowd of Bhopal was responsive and the participation level was high among the crowd. The journey continued to Aurangabad where we did two workshops in a single day because of the demand. We addressed the pharmacy students in the morning and then engineering students in the afternoon session.  The journey continued to Malegaon where, again there were two workshops done in two days with Pharmacy and engineering students as our audience. The engineering students were thankful that we conducted such an event. The pharmacy students participated with full enthusiasm and had unique learning experience from the crowd. We travelled to Pune from Malegaon and covered students from Computer Science and Micro Biology streams. The final destination came down to Mumbai itself. We did 2 programs in Mumbai for the students who are aspiring to become teachers and the other program for the Commerce students. All the programs were highly successful and every place has its own unique experience of learning and training.
What was covered?
The workshop had 3 major parts done with an effective training session covering Resume Building, Group Discussion and Personal Interview.
Resume Building
A resume is like a catalogue for every student to express and highlight their skill sets. We made the students to make their resume in the workshop by guiding them to write with their own skill sets. This helped majority of the students to sit down and make the resume for the first time in their life. We also shared some sample CVs with the students to give them an insight about a CV structure.
Group discussion
In GD, the students were trained on how to participate, present themselves in a group. The students were given industry perspective of why Group Discussion is critical in an interview. We form groups from the crowd and make them participate in a mock group discussion by giving them a topic. After the discussion, we give the feedback to the students on how to improve it and avoid small mistakes. The students improve a lot once they go through the mock round.
Personal Interview
The students are trained on how to answer questions in a personal interview. A list of questions are asked and the students come up with different answers. Then the students are trained on how to handle the tricky questions like, ‘What is your weakness?’ and some generic yet important questions like, ‘Tell me about yourself?’
At the end of every training workshop, the students are given a Question and Answer session where they come up with different questions related to Career planning, Interview questions and how to choose a career.
Benefit to Students
The students give varied feedback from generic and being specific on how they learned to introduce themselves for the first. Some of them had feedback about learning the industry perspective of conducting a group discussion. Some students got to know how to apply for jobs. The learning curve of the students was high and they were able to learn some great practical etiquettes of cracking an interview.