Session 1: Counselling | Training | Mentoring The inaugural session, this will be a general talk that will touch upon all topics under the ambit of WAC 2016, giving you a glimpse into what’s to come in the two day conference. The three very basic, rudimentary steps to a successful career and informed career choice are Counselling, Training and Mentoring. Counselling is the step which- over the last few years- increasing masses of people has come to identify and appreciate as vital to a student’s life. Earlier, an Indian student had a very narrow set of careers to choose from, and it was often taken for granted that they he would follow in his father’s footsteps. Not anymore, many parents are realizing the need to make first rate counseling available to their kids so that the career they wind up in aligns with both their passion and their core strengths. Training – although forming merely the threshold of a student’s career of choice, a threshold that doubles as a launch pad – is also a vital stage in its own right. It assumes ever greater significance in the Indian context, where for the bulk of the population, education is either non-existent or completely out of tune with the skills demanded of the student in the marketplace. Therefore, it becomes of paramount importance to train entry level professionals – teach them the ropes, so to speak. Mentoring is the stage that completes the process of forming a well-rounded career. In a more broad-based, all-encompassing sense, mentoring is a process that starts sometime during the training stage and lasts for much of a person’s professional life. In the stricter sense of professional mentorship, we are referring to special programs of corporate mentorship, wherein new employees are set up in a mentor-mentee relationship with a senior, more senior executive for their grooming and acclimatization into the work environment.