Here are some tips on being practical and employable in IT industry:

• Motivation, attitude, emotional quotient are key. Many studies have shown that earlier model of only IQ has its pitfalls. You need to have the right emotional quotient with IQ to succeed
• Your habits make you succeed. Surf news sites like www.economictimes.com, www.zdnet.com, www.moneycontrol.com, go to Wikipedia, MSDN, Oracle Java site, IBM Redbooks and your specific product sites daily rather than only your one programming site
• Read about domains / functional topics daily
  Be an analyst / consultant who codes not the other way round. You have to see a problem and solve it via code. You don’t have to be super coder, you have to be super problem solver, logical thinker, analyst, domain person who is a super coder
• Talk to your family daily, go for short walks everyday during office hours of 5 minutes each. Talk to people, socialize, make your small groups, collaborate, bounce ideas. Use WhatsApp, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn not just for gossip but also for knowledge. Enjoy nature. Attend trainings other than your domain / technology too
• Collaboration, mindset, attitude will solve your problem not just technology. Be a human being not a robot. Build relationships and friendships not work process
• Keep your ego in check
• Read about various cultures across the world and at least travel to one or two countries before age 30 or so. See various states of India
• Listen to spiritual and motivational speakers, leaders in life with your daily knowledge dose
• Learn various forms of communication – talking, writing, emailing and so on
• Remember all leaders and successful people failed multiple times before they succeeded so try and refine, improve
• People have differing view-points. Diversity brings various view-points, learn to integrate with them. You may not agree but you can listen and think about it. There are contexts, reasons, behaviors, thoughts that all people have. Not all are similar. Group of 100 people is a mob if all think in the same way, they become a team when they work together in-spite of differences. Differences bring new way of life and solutions in business and personal life
• Buy gadgets and test them, see new trends but sleep 6 to 7 hours daily, drink 8 to 10 glasses of water
  Go to your competitor’s sites, see demos on YouTube. Focus on bigger picture and then see the details. Think like JAVA, OOPS. See the real world and map it to interacting objects, solve a problem and code. Learn from people who are better than you rather than just the ones who know less than you
• Architectural thought. Be a consultant, analyst and architect who codes not vice versa. Learn architectural and design patterns, project management, testing, explore various certifications like TOGAF and so on. Remember a bike/cycle’s wheels have many spokes. You should appreciate all roles in a company
• Now coming to coding:
  a. Business and solution first
  b. Architecture and patterns next
  c. Algorithm and pseudo code follows
  d. Write the code like it’s your last day in life but learn as if you will be here till eternity
  e. Document, comment, email milestone – Javadoc. There is no code without documentation and collaboration
  f. Don’t forget the database, NoSQL, cloud, SAAS, bigdata and so on. There is a big world out there even in technology. Have a hobby website which you build and update, write a blog
  g. Learn the latest and code one step behind. All the latest product, technology may not be bug free. Learn it but deploy in production when you understand it well
• Be a well-rounded human being and you will succeed more rather than a super coder. A person with 120/125 out of 150 who is persistent, has good EQ and keeps learning is likely to succeed rather than person with 140 out of 150 IQ without EQ. You can’t win alone, you need a team