This was our final session and we looked at the common competencies in our various career paths.
We identified the common competencies, skills,and experience, personality and attitudes required in our future careers. My career path being Human resource management, after going through various job advertisement I identified some common competence among the best three jobs that I considered. This common competencies can be seen in my online portfolio.
We also mentioned the skills, experience, personality and attitude and qualifications required, which can all be seen in my online portfolio.
This is when we begin to research into our career pathway, we need to use various sources to research the career path that we may choose. The research will be based on jobs in the following sectors, Human resource management, Marketing, Finance and Management.
We need to research job advertisement in our chosen path, which in my case will be Human Resource Management.
Knowing my career path already, I used the following website http://hr-jobs.peoplemanagement.co.uk/jobs/ and http://www.personneltoday.com/Home/, in doing my research. I focused more on the job description and the person specification in each job advertisement. This is when the hard work began and after going through several HR jobs advertisement I was able to identify the education and attainment, experience and skills, and competences required. I also gain more knowledge on human resource management industry as a whole, their various roles, areas and their job description.
This gives me a broader knowledge on my chosen career path, how to work towards meeting the requirements and what employers are offering to successful candidates.
In this session we evaluated the 10 key competences, these competences are Personal management, communication, managing information, research and analysis, project, task and organizational skills, team work, commitment to quality, professional behaviour, social responsibility and continuous learning.
These competences are key elements that employers look out for when recruiting, it is very important to demonstrate these competences during interviews. The video below explains briefly what competencies are.
Using the competencies discussed in today's session will benefit every student. I identified the meaning and ways to develop these skills effectively during this session. A personal management skill, according to an author refers to the ability of oneself to exercise control over one’s attitude, behaviour and motivation (Simon Oates, Management-Expert.co.uk). Examples of personal management skills include: Self-Discipline, Motivation, Time Management, Emotional Stability, Strategic Thinking, Analytical Mind, Intelligence, and Ethics.
Communication skills; this is when a broad range of communication styles is being used and choosing the appropriate, effective ways to communicate to different audiences in diverse situations. Managing information is the practice of critical thinking, organizing, storing, and sharing vital information, so that everyone can benefit from its use.
Today's session is a continuation of last week's session, we completed the swain analysis, and we discussed several ways of identifying our strenths and how we can improve on our weaknesses. At the end of the session I learnt the distinction between strengths and weaknesses and why it is important to focus on strengths and not to allow our weakness hold us back. I also discovered how to manage and work around my weaknesses when focusing on my strengths.
We also discussed our aspirations,interest and needs, we sometimes doubt what to do or whether or not there will be uncertainties. This is one reason why knowing your SWAIN is very useful. Knowing your aspirations, interest and needs puts you in the right direction when it comes to choosing a course, career, partner, etc. It is also important to note that one course or one career do not suit everyone so knowing all this factors will help us choose what suits us best.
This section was about performing an analysis with a partner, this analysis is termed as SWAIN. SWAIN; strengths, weaknesses, aspirations, interest and needs.
We asked our partners set questions in the Swain analysis to identify their strengths, weaknesses, aspirations, interest and needs and the process is repeated to identify ours as well. This analysis helps us to think through our Strengths, Weaknesses, Aspirations and Interests in your career and personal life.
Knowing ones strengths and weakness is a very important step in determining the direction of your career. For example if I am very good with people, I would consider a career path that I will be dealing with people and this will make me a good employee as it is my strength. This session was very effective and it has given me a clear understanding of the importance of knowing our "SWAIN".
This session was all about introduction to the Business Research Project and setting up our online portfolios. We were introduced to Livebinder, a very useful tool that makes organizing and sharing information online very easy. We had to sign up on Livebinder.com and created a new binder for our online reflective journal and to store documents. I found livebinder very useful and a good tool for every student.
We touched on professional competences, common career competences and our career plans. This session was very useful as it serves as the basics of the Research project.
The online journal will be used in recording whatever we add to our portfolio on weekly basis and the weekly reflection on each session will be saved in this journal.
