MICROSOFT TALENT INDIA 2014

Students from Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida attended a Microsoft Event: Talent India 2014 at hotel Taj Palace on 30th September 2014.

The day, which was packed with events, included the address of Ms. Smriti Irani, Hon’ble Union Minister for Human Resource Development and Mr. Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft along with Microsoft’s announcement of commercial cloud services – Azure and Office 365, from local data centres by the end of 2015. With a clear focus on India’s youth and the growing internet population, Mr. Nadella and his team also shared Microsoft’s ‘Women in Tech’ and ‘YouthSpark Programme’.

Mr. Nadella said it was just beginning of yet another journey for him as he wears the cap of Microsoft global CEO. He connected with the 800 students at a venue in Delhi and thousands across the country through live streaming.

In his address to the students, Mr. Satya Nadella shared “It is just fantastic to be talking to the youth of this India. The energy is palpable, the optimism is palpable, and the confidence is here to be seen. I have had the chance to meet many people in India broadly, I have been able to get that sense. If you look at what is happening today in India, look at the business model innovation, look at the designs that are made for this country, and at the same time, the engineering skills, it’s that coming together. That multi-disciplinary approach to innovation which is what I believe all of you represent, is perhaps going to shape and change what you will do and what you will create.

Perhaps most important of all, is you (students) have to fall in love with what you do. Because everything else then simply becomes easy.”

While Mr. Nadella, who is on his first trip to the country after becoming the CEO, spoke about the importance of doing what you love and looking at every opportunity as a learning experience, Ms. Irani spoke about the importance of IT as a key factor in providing a better tomorrow for India’s youth as promised by her government. “Soon, every Central University, Indian Institute of Technology, and the Indian Institute of Management will have scholarship programmes. And we are focusing on the Northeast too. We will facilitate 2,000 students and 500 faculty members to travel to these institutes and see the technology used there, as well as other things that they could use in their own institutes. This will go hand-in-hand with scholarships for 10,000 students,” she said, adding that another feature she would introduce is a council for academic and industry interface, which will have a placement cell at all Central Universities as well as IITs and IIMs.

Students asked questions that ran from how soon technology would be made available to those in small towns to how a person could move with the times in spite of working for decades in the same industry.

The importance of continuous “learning” and not just continuous “employment”, as well as the ability to listen, change with the times and experiment, and learn to move on from failure were listed as the key factors for professional success.