Well, let me summarize your query, you want to join industry. You have 6 years of experience (3 years in academic and 3 years research area). It is not clear in which field you are in at present.

Before you enter into industry, you need to understand your career objective, knowledge, skills set and your specialization.

1) Career objective: Clear career objective is crucial for making decision about caree. I would request you to consider following questions and reflect:

What is your career objective?

Where do you see yourself after 5 years and 10 years?

What made you think to shift to industry?

How will changing your career help your personal and professional development?

How will you manage transition from one area of work to another?

Are you ready to work in competitive environment?

2) Knowledge: Domain specific knowledge is important. You have acedemic and research experience and might have sound theoretical knowldge. Indusry required applied knowledge. It is important to analyze whether you can apply your knowledge in industry setting.

What is specilized domain where you would like to work?

Do you have applied knowledge of your domain?

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

How do you plan to sharpen your knowledge?

3) Skills: In any workplace, people are hired for their knowledge and skills. Your academic and research experience may help you build other skills which are essential in corporate sector. As a acedemican and researcher, your domain specific knowledge, writing skills will definately help you.Apart from domain specific knowledge, following skills are important. This is right time to evaluate your skills and improve, inculcate skills which are necessary to work in industry.

Assess each skill on the scale of 0-100. You can average the total score. Ideally for corporate job, you should score 70 or above on following skills to make long term career in industry setting.

Decision-making: Assess your decision-making skills on 0-100 scale. You need to develop decision-making skills that help you perform your role better. Not all job requires decision-making but middle-management, and top-management job profiles require sharp and quick decision-making skills. So where do you fall on the scale? You should score between 60-80 score to enter into corporate. If your score is below 60, make sure your cultivate this skills before you decide to enter into industry.

Leadership: Leadership skills include your vision, confidence, ability to take initiative and face criticism. You need to have clear vision about your actions, great confidence to implement activities and intiativeness to work on new ideas. While you take leadership, many people will criticize you and you need to takes criticism positively and put yourself clearly to other people.

Time-management: You need to learn effective time-managent. In industry, you need to work in tight schedule and manage multiple assignment. Mostly you need to adhere to the deadline. Do you have enough time-management skills.

Problem-solving skills: Problem-solving primarily mean dealing with everyday professional life and choosing alternatives in a way that benifit the orrganization and simplify your work. This soft skill is neccesary in any corporate field.

People management skills: it is important to have skills to work with people and engage with people productively. Management skills often required in the industry. You may undertake some management courses through regular or distance mode.

Communication skills: This is another essential skills to express your views, ideas and perspectives clearly.

Attitude and behavior:Need to cultivate positive attitude and proactive behavior. As Shiv Khera said, "People are always hired for their knowledge and skills, but they are fired for their attitude." Attitude is very important. Right attitude can keep you at job.

Now evaluate yourself, where do you fall? Following tips to start working:

1) Build industry specific knowledge and skills

2) Get additional certification on management or industry specific area

3) Prepare an impressive curriculum vitae

4) Prepare for interview.

Hope this will help you. If you still have queries, feel free to ask. I would be happy to answer your queries and help you plan your career.

Wish you Best Luck, Apurva

Its unfortunate to know that you are wishing to leave the wonderful teaching and research sector and join the corporate industry. Actually many youngsters want to go for research wing, but dont get a chance.

I would like to recommend you to re-think on your decision to change from teaching to corporate once again.

However I am glad that you approached CareerGuide.com for seeking guidance on your career development.

If you wish to join the industry, your teaching experience will be equivalent to zero. Your research experience may get accounted in getting a job, provided based on what type of research you have done.

I feel you can enter into the corporate industry at a fresher level and aim for research and development jobs if available. But if not, my strong suggestion is that you should accept a job which comes your way and enter into the corporate. Looking and building job profiles and areas will be done later as you take on experience.

For getting employed in corporate, apart from the engineering skill what is required is Management skills. You can think of getting a Project Management certification like CAPM form PMI. www.pmi.org is the website and you can contact the local training center of PMI. This certification will help you to make yourself stand out of the rest while going for selection rounds of the companies.

Also ensure that you have the communications skills and IT skills required for companies.

Also if possible you may opt for Visiting Faculty jobs in engineering college side by side doing a full time job.

Best Luck

Dr. Anand Wadadekar

Discovering Careers India