A Finance Expert's Views on Career Coaching (w/ Vaibhav Jain)

We recently had an interview with Vaibhav Jain, who has a Private Wealth Management role at Edelweiss Financial Services. Vaibhav is an IIM-Indore graduate and worked for 4 ½ years with Deutsche Bank before moving on to Edelweiss in 2018.

His role at Edelweiss involves Portfolio Management for partners, solving any financial service requirement for founders and promoters, especially startups, analyzing the risk profile, recommending appropriate asset allocation, providing continuous detailed analytics on the overall portfolio of the client, providing a gateway into Edelweiss Financial Services and the network to the clients, and being the single point of contact for any advice and help related to financial services.

Here’s the Full Interview

Q1. How many years have you been coaching for now? Has it just been online or you've done offline coaching as well?

Informally, I’ve been doing it for more than 10 years... Like going and teaching my juniors during my college years.

If we just talk about my formal teaching experience, I’ve been doing it since 2015. The majority of the teaching that I’ve done has been offline. I only started teaching online after I started collaborating with Board Infinity, which is about a year.

Q2. How has this whole coaching experience been for you? How has it helped you grow professionally & personally?

It has been great!

I’ve always loved teaching others and sharing my knowledge… Soon after my graduation, I was given an opportunity to coach for a startup in the education sector. I worked on the weekdays and taught students on the weekends, it was a very enjoyable experience for me.

When you teach someone, the knowledge that you already have about a subject is enhanced. The questions asked by students make you think in-depth about a topic, that maybe you just had surface knowledge of. Your fundamentals are also getting revised every day, and this leads you to become better professionally. Personally, it gives me a lot of fulfillment to teach or provide value to someone.  

Q3. Are there things that you like and dislike about online learning? If so, what & why?

The thing that I like the most about online learning/teaching is that it can be done at your convenience. A lot of unnecessary time is wasted in traveling, waiting for students to settle down before the class, student travel, etc. You can just sit at your home with a decent laptop and an internet connection, and you’re able to teach students directly by sharing your screen. Doing this same thing offline can get a bit challenging sometimes since you won’t always get a good internet connection, you always have to carry a pen drive with your session files, you need to set everything up before the class, etc.

Another good thing is that every lecture gets recorded & shared directly with the student. This allows them to go through lectures as many times as they want, which is an amazing thing in itself. There is also no limitation on the number of students that can enter one class, whereas offline, there’s a limitation depending on the size of the classroom.

The main issue right now with online learning/teaching is that you feel like you’re speaking to walls. There are things you can do to see student interactions... like polls, comments, and so on but I prefer to see the faces of the students and their expressions, it allows me to get a better idea of how well the class is going. I also like to include a bit of humor during my sessions, but the reaction can’t really be gauged online.

Q4. Do you think other industry professionals should take up coaching? If so, why?

Of course, I think they definitely should!

The main advice I’d give to other professionals who want to take up coaching is that money shouldn’t be a priority when you’re imparting knowledge to anyone. Be very selfless while sharing your knowledge, and remember that your knowledge increases exponentially when you share it with others.

Coaching can also be a bit intimidating at the start, but as you keep going you’ll start noticing a positive change in your self-confidence and your public speaking ability. Another thing is, you’ll be able to develop and expand your network even further.

Q5. Where do you see this sector going, 10 years down the line?

Personally, I think it has the capability to disrupt the formal mode of education (offline education) strongly. With the exponential increase in internet penetration in India, the EdTech sector is also likely to grow exponentially. Especially in tier 3 & tier 4 cities where the education is not really up to the mark, the EdTech sector can bring along huge benefits for the Indian population.

Board Infinity also has been playing a huge part in helping out students who want to get into a certain industry. They help students accelerate their careers exponentially by bridging the gap between students and corporates. Connecting the students with an industry professional who has 5-10 years of experience allows the students to understand the different career options that they actually have.

I’m excited to see where this whole sector and Board Infinity is headed in the future.

You can check out Coach Vaibhav Jain here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaibhavjain87