4BU006 – Best Learning for Business Success Assignment

Get the best assignment on 4BU006 – Learning for Business Success Assignment.

Introduction

In my life I have always worked towards betterment and development of my professional skills since I have always aimed at becoming a successful business executive after the completion of my current course on business administration. Therefore, in the previous assignment, I have developed a personal development plan in compliance with strengths and weaknesses that I have in my professional character. Some of my strengths included development of people skills, empathy, stress management, problem-solving, decision-making and analytical skills. However, despite much strength in my professional character, I have also certain weaknesses that include lack of effective managerial role, lack of confidence during public speaking, and also time management skill. Therefore, the personal development plan that I have developed in previous assignment rested primarily on development of managerial skills, public speaking skill, and time management skill. I took a period of 1.5 years to achieve all these skills. However, there were certain good things and bad things regarding my experience and therefore, the current research include information on experience that I have encountered while implementing my personal development plan. My reflection has been presented in form of a STAR framework segregated in situation, tasks, actions and results.

Situation

The situation that has set my personal development plan was conducting a SWOT analysis on me which revealed plenty of strengths and weaknesses in me. Moreover, I was also well acquainted with opportunities that I could have utilized or threats that might hinder my professional growth. My aim in life was to be highly skillful and constitute effectiveness of the course that I am currently pursuing. In the opinion of Almahry, Sarea and Hamdan (2018), some of the crucial factors that are needed in business administration and management are leadership skills, knowledge on foreign policy, political economy, teamwork and collaboration, conflict management and others. In the course of my educational field, I have gained adequate knowledge on several aspects related to business areas, such as leadership and management. The personal development plan that I have developed focused on plenty of areas such as time management, managerial and leadership skills, and public speaking skill. These factors have been identified to be my weaknesses at various courses during my educational field.

As such, while I was pursuing the course, I was given plenty of group works that I needed to work within 4-6 other members. However, at certain times I have witnessed that I have faced many numbers of difficulties while working with other people, particularly in terms of an effective decision-making, allocation of tasks, equal distribution of work, time management and even communication. As opined by Gil-Garcia et al. (2019), some of the most important roles of a manager is to constitute teamwork and collaboration, implement time management, fairly distribute tasks among people and ensure smooth working environment. However, whenever I faced difficulties in aforementioned areas, I realized the lack of managerial skills in me and that is why, one of the foremost aims that I had was to develop my managerial skills.

Furthermore, there were also times when I was given presentations to work on and later I was entrusted to speak on those presentations in front of my tutors and other audience. However, while speaking in front of such large audience, I witnessed that I would usually fumble and be nervous hugely. That was indicative of lack of confidence in me and also poor verbal communication skill due to which I was unable to speak in front of huge number of people. Thus, due to this situation, I aimed at developing my public speaking skill as part of personal development plan.

Task

At the very beginning, I focused on managerial skills and the areas that I focused on were teamwork and collaboration, equal distribution of work, and communication. At the very beginning, I insisted some of my friends to work in a project with me and I focused on steps such as planning, organizing, controlling and monitoring (Wolniak, 2019). At the very beginning, I made a detailed plan of things that were needed to be completed for that project and the tasks that were to be done for each of the factors. In that way, I would be able to segregate the tasks and distribute the tasks evenly. After that, I focused on allocating time for each of the tasks so that excess time is not taken for project completion. The tasks for eradicating communication issue were to provide a one by one chance to each of the team members to share their views and opinions. In that way, each of the individuals would avail equal opportunity to take part in communication.

The second objective I had was to improve my public speaking skill. For this factor, I would gather plenty of people from my family, friends and known ones. My aim was to prepare content and speak that in front of 5-10 members on a weekly basis. Therefore, at the very beginning, I approached my family members, friends and other known people and made them understand the context for which they needed to be a part of this. After that, my task was to prepare content. Before presenting the content to them, I would practice speaking that in front of mirror and pay attention to my body language, facial expression and movement of hands (Chen et al. 2016). I also used to make videos of me speaking so that I could identify the areas where I have gone bad and improve them. I also assessed my relatives, family members and friends to provide their opinion regarding the things that I could have improved. In that way, I aimed at developing my public speaking skill.

The third objective that I had was to develop time management skills. As stated by Sainz, Ferrero and Ugidos (2019), time management skill is extremely important in both personal and professional fields as it reduces stress and also improves the quality of work. Therefore, in order to work on this objective, my primary task was to take on projects and segregate the tasks. For each of the tasks, I would set up deadline and check the time required. I would practice the same task next day with a lesser deadline and in that way, I could work on my time management skill. Moreover, I also aimed at working in groups so that the tasks could be delegated equally among each of the members. In order to avoid unnecessary delay, I ensured to allocate tasks based on individual strengths so that they could complete the tasks much ahead of time.

Action

The employability skills that I have identified in my personal development plan were addressed by an action plan. For the first objective which was to improve managerial efficacy, my action plan included building trust and loyalty among the people who I work with. As influenced by Larson and Langlotz (2017), I always focused on communication so that I could express myself well and provide information related to me. This factor would help in gaining their confidence. The second part of my action plan was to outline roles and responsibilities of each of the team members. I took help from Belbin’s team building model and identified strengths of each member so that they could be allocated with tasks as per their preference and expertise.

In order to address public speaking skill development, I focused on making an effective plan so that I could understand the areas that I am weak in. Thus, at the preliminary stage, I took a video recording of me speaking in front of public and identified the issues that I have while speaking (Nasution and Sukmawati, 2019). Moreover, I also took help from my tutors and professors who provided me with information regarding the areas that I go wrong during public speaking. Taking their help was extremely important as they are well affluent with body language and non verbal communication cues and readily identify the speaking issues.

The action plan that I implemented for development of time management skill was to prioritize the tasks that were most important. Furthermore, I also used to analyze beforehand regarding the tasks that would take most amount of time and tried to complete those first and then do the tasks that would take lesser time. As influenced by Khan et al. (2017), I also ensured that I do tasks without interruption and strictly adhere to time so that it could be completed within deadline. At the end of each task, I would check the time required and in case any task would have taken extra time, I would try the factors that have contributed to delay. In that way, my planning skill developed a lot related to time management.

Results

The tasks that I have identified and action plan developed by me while completing my personal development plan have helped me in development of my skills to a huge extent. The tasks and action plan undertaken by me for managerial skill improvement have helped me to develop in three areas which were teamwork and collaboration, distribution of tasks and communication. However, I have witnessed that action plans for public speaking skills has helped me to improve my verbal speaking skills more and that have helped me in teamwork as well. This was because with help of clear articulation of information to other members of projects and in that way, they have gained clearer information about me. Thus, that has helped in development of trust and confidence among them.

The actions plan implemented for time management skill resulted in certain difficulties as at the very beginning I was unable to plan accordingly. This was primarily due to lack of my analytical skill for which I was unable to segregate the different tasks of the project efficiently, thereby not allocating time required for each task. However, in the later stage, I took help from one of my professors who has helped me in segregating different tasks of a project. In that way, I have been able to gain betterment in my time management skill.

The third factor was public speaking skill. The action plan and tasks such as speaking in front of family members, relatives and taking advice from my tutors have helped me to a great extent and thus, public speaking was that one area on which I gained maximum knowledge and skill.

Conclusions

To conclude, it is to be stated that the personal development plan has helped in development of my employability skills to a huge extent through tasks and action plans that I have undertaken. I have conducted a SWOT analysis for understanding my strengths and weaknesses and that I have been well equipped with the skills that I needed to improve. The tasks and action plan that I have developed have helped in development of my analytical skill. The overall fulfillment of objectives shall help me in employment area to a huge extent.

Reference List

Almahry, F.F., Sarea, A.M. and Hamdan, A.M., (2018). A review paper on entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurs’ skills. Journal of Entrepreneurship Education, 21(2S).

Gil-Garcia, J.R., Guler, A., Pardo, T.A. and Burke, G.B., (2019). Characterizing the importance of clarity of roles and responsibilities in government inter-organizational collaboration and information sharing initiatives. Government Information Quarterly, 36(4), pp.101393-101418.

Wolniak, R., (2019). Operation manager and its role in the enterprise. Production Engineering Archives, 24(24), pp.1-4.

Sainz, M.A., Ferrero, A.M. and Ugidos, A., (2019). Time management: skills to learn and put into practice. Education+ Training, pp.3-16.

Chen, L., Feng, G., Leong, C.W., Joe, J., Kitchen, C. and Lee, C.M., (2016). Designing an automated assessment of public speaking skills using multimodal cues. Journal of Learning Analytics, 3(2), pp.261-281.

Larson, D.B. and Langlotz, C.P., (2017). The role of radiology in the diagnostic process: information, communication, and teamwork. American Journal of Roentgenology, 209(5), pp.992-1000.

Nasution, S.S. and Sukmawati, N.N., (2019). Model United Nations: Improving the Students’ Speaking Skill. JEES (Journal of English Educators Society), 4(2), pp.47-52.

Khan, K.I.F.A.Y.A.T., Tahir, T., Ishfaq, U. and Khan, A.S.A.D., (2017). A study to examine teachers’ classroom time management strategies at secondary school level. Journal of Business and Tourism, 3(2), pp.71-83.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Career Action plan

Tasks	Action	Timeline
To develop time management skill	Segregate several tasks into small tasks and allocate time for each of the tasks	6 months
To develop leadership and management skills	To communicate effectively To focus both on listening, verbal and written communication skill To ensure development of analytical skill in order to ensure effective strategic decision To focus on teamwork and collaboration	1-1.5 months
To develop public speaking skill	To speak in front of my known ones and asking for their opinion	6 months