Recently we interacted with Mr. Sawan Kapoor, Career Coach, who has successfully trained more than 1.5 lakh career aspirants via “Power Up Your Career” masterclasses. Here are the interview highlights:
- Shed some light on your journey as a career coach? How did you come up with the idea? What have been the key achievements so far?
As Steve Jobs so eloquently articulated, the dots only connect when you look back. I believe today that my career from its very start played the defining role in my becoming a career coach. I got hired at a time when the larger economic condition was quite bleak. This was right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. I was in my final semester at university and had been interviewing aggressively with several companies that were visiting our campus. And up until the 10th of September I had received 8 job offers. The next day changed everything (September 11th, 2001). All the job offers I had were rescinded and taken back by the companies. Despite having nothing to do with this event, it impacted me and my future so gravely. It set me thinking about how a job candidate can have more control to get hired into the right opportunity. And how little power they have in the job search and application process. Being an analytical mind, these ideas kept brewing in my head.
Then in 2006 I changed jobs as I was dissatisfied with the progress I was making in my career. My ambitions were greater than the pace at which my career was developing and my efforts, dedication and results were also stronger than the reality of my paycheque. But I made a critical mistake, I changed jobs but I did not evaluate the culture of the company I was joining. In fact this was a limitation almost all working professionals come up against, there was no process or method to learn about the true ground reality of the culture of the organisation prior to joining them. And I was fired from this job in less than six months. It wasn’t the company’s fault, I had joined them and therefore it was my responsibility to learn how to fit into their mission. But the amount of change I needed to achieve in how I worked was too much for me to achieve in that short time frame. I felt totally powerless and marginalised despite being a hard working and loyal worker.
It was then that I used my process to go after opportunities instead of using the traditional manner in which professionals apply for jobs. And in less than 30 days, I generated 4 job offers and each one was at least 3 times the salary of my last position, if not greater. That is when I realised that my system works! I went on to head America’s largest private label wine & spirits business and build it into the most profitable company in the industry.
Working professionals and career aspirants from over 60 plus industries have enrolled in our programs and have generated offers from Indian companies and from over 27 countries internationally. Our “Power Up Your Career” Masterclass, a 4 hour LIVE online session that I conduct is now being made mandatory for several universities and colleges so that students coming into the workforce are better prepared to take on the rigors of professional life.
- How many working professionals have joined the APEX program so far?
Over 1,50,000 career aspirants and working professionals have enrolled in our programs. Our “Power Up Your Career” masterclass is a brief 4 hour LIVE line session that allows busy people interested in developing their career to understand how they can significantly and rapidly increase their salary in multiplesunder 90 days.
It shows them a proven methodology that allows them to target any company and secure the offer. And since this is a system they use repeatedly, it creates an acceleration in their career helping accelerate their promotions and progress in one-third the time it takes individuals who do not understand this methodology. And at the same time it positions them in a way where the competition for the job becomes irrelevant. For candidates the job search and application journey is a blind journey, a job seeker does not know who else is applying, so learning how to differentiate yourself is critical as you walk this journey.
Many people land up in misaligned careers where a few years into the job they feel lost and confused. The energy they once had has dissipated and their head and their heart is not in the game anymore. But by now the realities of life have set in. They have financial obligations that have to be met. And they want to make a career switch, only they don’t know how to do so.
Our programs allow job seekers and working professionals to tackle all of these career pain points.
- What goals is he trying to achieve by 2023?
Our goal is to reach 1 million working professionals to educate, inspire and empower them to land their dream jobs. A dream job is an opportunity where your skills, your talents, your education, your experiences, your knowledge and your personal qualities allow you to solve the extraordinary needs an organisation has. These extraordinary needs are needs that go beyond what you find on the standard job
description, which one can only uncover by conducting organised research on the company. And they exist in every company, at every level of experience, in every industry and every business function. Furthermore, a second critical aspect of a dream job is that it must provide an environment that one fits well into. In life we decide who we are friends with, but we do not get to choose who we work with. Companies that one applies to already have people with a defined personality, an existing set of values and prevailing conditions. And unless we can fit into the working culture of a company, we will run into dead ends. One can be in a job where we love our salary but hate our work, or love our work but hate our salary – these are not sustainable.
The job search and application process is a process designed by employers and for employers. Essentially candidates compete to the company’s advantage. It is the organisations that call the shots in this process, the control remains in the company’s hands and that can be quite frustrating for job seekers. Our mission is to give the power back to the working professional who is seeking to improve his or her salary, their professional fulfilment and their work – life balance.
India’s leading export is its people, not only do they power our country but also the workforce of many nations around the world. Indian management is well acknowledged for our ability to lead and we want to contribute to increasing this number significantly in the coming years.
- What is the average customer base?
We work across the complete spectrum of the job market. From helping freshers who are coming into the workforce, to mid – career professionals, as well as senior leaders. The majority of our customers are people who are driven with regard to their careers and want to learn how to reach the very top.
About 30% of our students are from the IT sector, followed next by operations and sales. Then marketing, finance, supply chain, and the other business functions contribute to the rest of the mix. Each and every function is represented in our students and we have thousands of success stories where candidates have achieved phenomenal gains by adopting the methodologies we teach.
That said, getting the job is just the start of the game. We also work with our students guiding them to onboard properly. When a working professional changes jobs or gets a promotion it can be a stressful time for them. Everyone is looking at them trying to figure out what change will they experience with this new person coming in. And one’s early success or early failure in a new role is the best indicator of one’s overall success or failure in that role. So we continue to support our students to not only become successful but also stay successful and further grow from that platform.
- What is the future roadmap for you as a career coach?
We are grateful and humbled to have this opportunity to serve our country’s most important asset, our vibrant population. I feel it is India’s time to take its rightful place on the global stage. As the world’s 5th largest economy, with goals of getting to US $5 Trillion by 2026 and $10 Trillion by 2030, I am very bullish about our motherland.
Our nation has built a fantastic startup ecosystem, and the Prime Ministers Gati Shakti initiative which is investing over 100 lakh crores into our country’s infrastructure are all steps in the right direction. The macro – economic framework is coming into place for the next two decades to take our country back to the “soney ki chidiya” it was once known as.
We are already working with technology companies and artificial intelligence platforms to make our services and programs available across all regional languages in our country. Our goal is to provide affordable and leading edge career education so the Indian dream can come to fruition for the common men and women of our country. From there we would possibly go to international markets.
