Personal Skills for Business Management Students
Drawing upon your experience of study and learning during the past two semesters, reflect on the development of your academic and generic skills. Identify your strengths and weaknesses, and suggest areas which you need to improve or develop, including the strategies you will use to do so.
Student ID: 1185897
Effective academic and personal skills are not inborn; they are something one can work on and develop through practice and reflection. Taking the Personal Skills module significantly aided my personal and academic development in that it helped me identify key gaps in my skills portfolio and develop effective strategies and techniques to address key areas of weaknesses. This ability is crucial not only for academic performance, but is also highly valued in the workplace, as knowing how to turn weaknesses into strengths and further improve them is of utmost importance to the constant learning process. Calling upon personal experience and using insights from the emerging literature on skills development I will attempt to critically assess my academic performance so far, discuss strategies that will potentially improve my skills and set goals to work towards. First, I will draw attention to one of my key strengths – academic writing in relationship to constructive feedback; then, I will analyze my experience with teamwork and finally, I will discuss a framework for maximising individual performance capacity. From my perspective, reflecting on your own performance is the best way to identify learning strategies that will work best for you, develop effective work habits and become an independent learner.
A good starting point in reflecting on my personal academic performance and skills development would be to outline one of my key strengths, which I have identified through feedback from markers and self-evaluation, namely critical analysis and its application to academic writing.