My Strategy To Crack IBPS PO & Clerk

IBPS Success Story – Taran Sikka

My name is Taran Sikka, aged 25 years. I have completed my B.Tech. in Mechanical and Automation Engineering from IP University, Delhi in 2013. Post that it was a long struggle for finding a job in my core field. I was lucky to have landed a campus placement in a major IT MNC. So after about 7 months of struggle, I reluctantly joined the IT firm. However, I did not gain any technical prowess during my 24 months with the MNC and the lack of growth opportunities made me worry about my future. I was dejected as everyone has some aspirations and dreams and my future seemed bleak with the company. Meanwhile, I was considering giving CAT and GATE but eventually I settled for the Banking Sector.

I started my preparation in November 2015. My first exam was LIC AAO 2016 followed by NABARD Assistant Manager in which I couldn’t make it to the next stage. I also appeared for SBI JA and SBI PO exams but didn’t get past the mains exam stage. All these failures motivated me to work hard for IBPS PO and IBPS Clerk 2016. I can proudly say that I qualified both the exams and got placed in IDBI bank and Bank of India as a PO and clerk, respectively.

My Preparation Strategy

Starting from November 2015, I started clearing my basic concepts of Reasoning, Maths and English. Since, I’m an avid reader and I’ve studied in an English medium school, the English language wasn’t a huge task for me. I focused on expanding my vocabulary with the book Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis. For mathematics, I solved the book FastTrack Arithmetic and for reasoning I picked Arihant’s book on Reasoning. All these books helped me build my concepts. For GK, I followed the GK capsules prepared by various sites. After that I started taking regular mock tests from Oliveboard starting with LIC AAO. I appreciate the fact that they have varying difficulty levels in their tests which are devoid of any mistakes. This helped me build my confidence for the actual exam. Their analytics tool helped me identify my weak areas, work on them and improve my scores. This is how I made it to the mains of both SBI JA and SBI PO 2016. In SBI JA, I missed the merit list by 10 marks and in SBI PO I missed the cutoff for the Interview by a mere 6 marks despite the difficulty level.

Tips for Future Aspirants

Appearing for further exams like IPPB Mains 2017, NIACL AO Mains 2017, IBPS Clerk Mains and IBPS PO Mains made me realize that there has been a gradual shift in the pattern of banking exams. My advice to future aspirants will be that they shouldn’t stick to books anymore. The internet has variety of sources to help them prepare for the new pattern. Also, one should change their strategy to suit the latest pattern. For instance, earlier candidates could get away with solving simpler questions like Number Series, Simplification, Quadratic Equations and Data Interpretation in the QA section.

Now, one has to focus more on mathematical concepts like Profit/Loss, Simple Interest and Compound Interest, Time-speed-distance etc. and should be good with Data Interpretation questions like Data Sufficiency, Caselets and Missing Data Tables. In Reasoning the level of Puzzles and Seating Arrangements has increased drastically, even coding-decoding questions which used to be the scoring point for many students have become more and more tough. In the English section, I recommend students to focus on vocabulary and refer to some CAT related books as questions like Paragraph completion, odd-sentence-out etc. have been seen in CAT as well. For GK, one may follow the news highlights regularly through the various blogs available for banking aspirants but should also revise the banking related current affairs up to 3 months before an exam through capsules.

Give your 100% in every exam!

All the very the best to all the future aspirants!