Employability Skills, Workplace Safety, Green IT, Communication and Entrepreneurship
Communication and employability
Know the 7 Cs - clear, concise, concrete, correct, coherent, complete, courteous. Distinguish verbal from non-verbal cues (tone, posture, eye contact) and practise active listening: paraphrase, ask, do not interrupt. Email etiquette means a meaningful subject line, a salutation, short paragraphs, no slang, and proofreading before sending. A résumé is one to two pages: contact, objective, education, skills, projects, achievements; a cover letter is tailored to the specific employer.
Workplace safety
- Ergonomics: chair height so feet rest flat, screen at arm's length and eye level, wrists neutral, 20-20-20 rule for eye strain.
- Electrical safety: no daisy-chained extension boards, no liquids near equipment, check earthing, unplug before servicing.
- Fire: raise the alarm, use the correct extinguisher with PASS (Pull, Aim, Squeeze, Sweep), know the exit route.
- Report every hazard and injury; keep the first-aid box accessible; for electric shock, switch off the supply before touching the person.
Green IT
Enable sleep and power-saving modes, switch off peripherals at day end, print duplex and only when necessary, use cloud and virtualisation to cut idle hardware, and send e-waste (batteries, monitors, toner) to authorised recyclers - never to the bin.
Entrepreneurship
Route: spot a problem → market survey → business plan (product, customer, cost, pricing, competition) → funding (savings, bank loan, MSME or Startup India schemes) → registration plus basic accounting and GST awareness.
Worked example
A 20-PC lab wants a lower electricity bill and must dispose of 8 old CRT monitors. Correct answer: enable sleep/hibernate and scheduled shutdown, switch off stabilisers and printers at day end, and hand the CRTs to an authorised e-waste recycler with a receipt - not sell them to a scrap dealer and not dump them.
Traps
Generic 'be a good communicator' answers; 'switch everything off' including servers; confusing corporate social responsibility with green IT; ignoring documentation of e-waste.