Developing business skills

Business Skills

At this point, I feel that I am ready for full-time employment. Certainly, though, I will be more ready once I complete my schooling. Right now I am juggling a fairly heavy load that involves both schoolwork and a number of activities outside of schoolwork. For me, leaning how to manage this load is something that will help to become a more effective member of the workforce. Time management is a critical skill, and so is the ability to meet deadlines -- there are not always extensions in the real world so I have to be prepared to have the work done right and done on time.

I feel that my education is progressing nicely. I have learned a number of things that will help me in dealing with others in my chosen profession. I have acquired some functional skills, and the background frameworks in critical thinking, issue management and interpersonal dealings that will help me to achieve good things in the real world. Such skills as conflict management are valuable to me, and it is also valuable to learn about and consider the perspectives of other people. As somebody who intends to pursue a career in marketing, I feel that this is going to help me considerably in the future.

The skills that I am learning as a student will help me immensely in the pursuit of a marketing career. It is critical not only to learn basic marketing knowledge, but also about people in general, because ultimately this is a career that relies on understanding human behavior and finding ways to modify that behavior for the benefit of the company. Having a good grounding in what makes different people tick is something that I know will help me.

Although I do feel good about my prospects for employment in the real world, I also understand that there is probably further room to grow, both in terms of acquiring functional skills but also other skills and knowledge as well. I get the sense that even though I know a lot more now than I did when I started, that I feel like I know less. That is, the more I know the more I realize how little I know. This is a good learning experience in itself, but especially when combined with actually having good knowledge about myself, my capabilities and even my weaknesses. The more I know about myself and about the skills that are going to be valuable, the more I will be prepared to embark on a path of continuous improvement in my career.

2. Over the course of this semester I've done some teamwork, and one team in particular was quite a challenge. To start with, I was surprised by the different levels of commitment that the team members had. Immediately, on the first initial small project, it became apparent that the team was going to have trouble -- only two people on the team of four were taking the class seriously. The other two team members were not business students, but just taking the course because they thought it would be easy. Thus, they did not have either the same grasp of the concepts nor did they seem to have much commitment to doing their best work. This posed a lot of trouble, because as the projects became more intense only two of us seemed to improve our effort. This really surprised me.

The episode was significant because even though at first I was frustrated I began to realize that this was a learning opportunity. People who want to get into management at some point in their careers are going to have to deal with situations like this. There are always going to be people within an organization who either lack the ability or lack the motivation and as manager you need to figure out what tools you can use to improve those things so that the team functions better.

Basically, the problem persisted the whole semester. The two good members of the team did not have a lot of formal authority, and appeals to the instructor to grade the members of the team separately were rejected. This caused a lot of tension within the team, and we considered just working on the projects the two of us, because relying on the others was causing problems. They were late and their work was sub-standard, leaving us to scramble to clean things up, with little time to spare.

Other students influenced my views on the subject. The first thing that I realized when talking to other classmates is that our group was notably unlucky, that most of the students in the course had a high level of motivation. This actually strengthened my resolve to transcend the situation. Without formal authority, we simply did the best work we could and made sure that the instructor was aware of what was going on. Sometimes that is all you can do. We learned that in future situations we need to be proactive to avoid these problems. While in school this can just mean choosing your own team members, there is a more important lesson to be learned in that when you are in the real world looking for a job, it pays to study the companies that you are looking to work for. It is much easier to perform well when you are surrounded by other good, motivated people with high skill levels and energy. I think that this long-run lesson is more important than the short-run lesson by far, because it will prevent me from facing this type of adverse situation when it really counts.

I think that my feelings in this situation were mostly frustration, but eventually myself and the other good team member came to the conclusion that even when things are difficult you need to remain calm and take the necessary steps to ensure that the work is of a high quality. Teamwork can be challenging and sometimes you really are forced to work with people that you probably do not want to work with. But it does not matter- the job is what matters. So by the end of the semester I learned to have some perspective about matters like this.