From Defence Services to Image Consultants and Soft Skills Trainers
Squadron Leader Dipti Kala served the Indian Air force as a Technical Officer in the Indian Air Force for a decade. She added lot of feathers in her cap during her service tenure including Award of Devotion to Duty from the Chief of the IAF, proud participant of Republic Day Parade 2015 and many more. During the service tenure, she underwent many courses on technical systems and stood first in the order of merit for all. After coming back from the courses, she always had an urge to train the team working under her in that field. This led her to find her second career calling of becoming a trainer. Though the passion was clear, she was directionless.
During that time, while being in service, she fell upon the opportunity to learn about ICBI and attended ICBI’s introductory session. And from then, there is no looking back. She enrolled herself in a Soft Skills and Image Management course. While the soft skills empowered her to empower others, the Image management gave her that required extra wings to fly towards success. With her knowledge of Defence and personality developed by ICBI, she has become 2 X TEDx speaker and India’s Youngest Defence Expert with 07 National Channels like AajTak, TV9, Wion TV, to name a few.
To further add on to her ICBI learnings, she became India’s First Certified Dream Coach ®, helping individuals achieve their Dreams and Goals. Now she is entering the corporate world with a new vision and mission. The foundation of her Dream to live up to her personal value of Freedom of Time and money was very well laid by ICBI, for which she will always be grateful to her alma mater.
Col. Sanjeet served in the Indian Army for thirty-five years with utmost dedication and zeal. During his study leave, he interacted with a large number of college students both graduates and post graduates; who in spite of doing so well in academics were not getting their dream jobs. He realized that there was a yawning gap between what employers were looking for in candidates and what candidates were offering. So, that was the time he decided to take voluntary retirement from the army and started a second inning to help students in getting their dream jobs.
Initially, he thought that his army experience would be enough to help those students in developing their personality, but soon he realized that, to help others he himself had to unlearn and relearn and he decided to master the soft skills himself first. So, he started looking for an institute which could meet his requirements. Very soon, through one of his friends he came to know about ICBI and in his first visit itself he enrolled himself in the year 2019.
Since then, there has been no looking back and in a very short span of less than three years he has achieved much more than he could ever have thought of. In the last three years he has been making differences in the lives of hundreds of students, teachers/professors and parents by conducting on-line/off-line workshops and sessions, in prestigious schools, colleges and universities in and around Delhi and NCR. He conducts regular classes on Employability Skills in Sir Chotu Ram College of Engineering and Technology, Meerut. He is a senior resource person for conducting ‘Career Skills’ sessions under ATAL Scheme OF AICTE. He is a senior trainer and motivational speaker on a number of learning platforms like: Adda Defence 247, Seekho, Expertron, Career Launcher and BYJU’S. He has been on a number of Talk Show’s like; Passiontales, Captain’s Podcast, Aakarsh Sharma show, and Soul & Smile Show. He is a well-known speaker on Josh Talk and Defence Expert and Analyst on India News Channel.
Col. Sanjeet Sirohi believes that good things come to people who wait, but better things come to those who go out and get them, has achieved in less than three years and that too at the age of 65 years.
Capt. Manjula Katoch (Retd.) is a third generation Army Officer. Being from the family of olive greens, gave her the opportunity to travel across the length and breadth of the country and expand her horizon. Leadership traits came naturally to her and she was a convincing public speaker right from her childhood. Born and brought up listening to the marshal tunes in the lush green ambience of Army Cantonments, she always dreamt of joining the Indian Army and her dream did come true with her hard work and dedication.
In her Army stint, Capt. Manjula gave her best shot serving the nation in counter insurgency areas of North and North Eastern sectors, which also strengthened her leadership skills and taught her best of the life lessons.
After successfully completing her Army stint, Capt. Manjula Katoch started enjoying her married life and motherhood parallelly working as an educator and a counselor. Being an Ex-Army officer and an army wife, she continued empowering people, especially women and young children to optimize their innate potential and to help them develop their personality in various educational institutes and vocational training centers.
After years of working in educational sector, Capt. Manjula also worked as an HR professional with a typical nine to six work culture and limited holidays. With growing up children and hectic social responsibilities, it was becoming difficult to manage a work life balance. This is when she took a sabbatical to do some soul searching.
Capt. Manjula realized that her quest for inspiring people was not over yet; however, she wanted to be her own boss and work as per her own flexibility. With the fast-changing times, only having experience and good communication skills is not sufficient to convert your passion into a profitable profession. You need to be a certified trainer from a renowned Institute. Scrolling on social media introduced her to this premiere institute: ICBI, which gave her the opportunity to be a certified Soft skills/ corporate trainer from the most prestigious Scottish Qualification Authority and expanded her possibilities many fold. The leadership qualities embedded by the virtue of being an Army officer coupled with her natural command over language gave her the confidence to hone her skills to become a successful Soft skills Trainer.
Capt. Manjula is now an established Soft Skills Trainer training young adult, defense aspirants and NCC cadets on various aspects of personality development and communication skills.
Capt. Manjula Katoch is a proud Alumnus of ICBI who feels that ICBI helped her explore her passion and potential to give it back to the society through a profitable business that too with a freedom to choose when and how much to work maintaining a work life balance.
As a young girl Suman secretly used to wish to adorn olive green and wear stars on her shoulders and salute the tiranga with pride as an Army officer, even when women were not even part of the Armed Forces except as doctors. Every year on 15th Aug and on 26 Jan events as a child she used to dream herself in the army uniform and her deep desire came true on a very powerful day, that is women’s day on 8th Mar 1999. She was commissioned in the Indian Army as a Lieutenant and served the nation for over a decade.
Her journey started from Chennai to Shillong and travelled across all the diverse states of the country. Her most memorable tenure was when she was posted in Jammu & Kashmir during the operation Parakaram. A new perspective towards life emerged when she used to hear every day about the valor and martyrdom of the young brave brothers in uniform. She was actively participating in the operation on one front and her husband was actively leading from the front in the other part of J&K in insurgency operations.
After ten years of exciting stint in the Indian Army, she with passion started guiding aspirants to join armed forces and realized that she wants to make it as a profession. To empower defence aspirants and students in their career, she was looking for a structured approach to develop their leadership qualities. She found ICBI as the appropriate institute which helps individuals to transform them from inside out, through their Image Management program.
She successfully completed the program and is now effectively conducting corporate training independently. Presently she is pursuing her dream of empowering students to join Armed Forces with MIT ADT University, Pune as a Director of NCC Wing and Head of Armed Forces Preparation Center through the powerful program named “Power of First Impressions” which is transforming students’ personal & professional lives to be dynamic leaders of the nation.