Developing Business Skills through Graduate Challenges

Graduate challenge

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Reflective Summary........................................................................................................................3
References........................................................................................................................................7

Reflective Summary
This reflective essay will be based on the description of my experiences in successfully
completing the three challenges in which I was actively involved in the university to develop my
skills, knowledge and behaviour, and gain in-depth and practical insights into how businesses
work. The three challenges that I undertook are namely the apprentice challenge, the presentation
challenge and the T-shirt challenge that are aimed at development on certain core skills and
business skills (Wain, 2017). They will help me in developing certain business kills that are
important for career growth, employability and career management. I will also devise an action
plan regarding how I will enhance and improve theses kills determined from the three challenges
in the next three years at the university. Employability skills are generally referred as to those
skills that are extremely essential in getting hired by the business and pertain to some core
competencies like communication, team work, problem solving, information technology and
time management (Vassilaki, 2017). Business skills can be referred to as those skills that are
essential in the career growth in the workplace in terms of the business world. They consist of
certain technical and soft skills that are essential to flourish in the business field and are needed
to effectively carry out business functions and activities productively. There are leadership,
operations, financial management, budgeting, human resource management, marketing,
promotions and branding, sales and customer service, negotiation, communication, networking
and interpersonal skills, time management, delegation etc. The activities and challenges that I
participated in encompassed the development of these skills in the students (Sarkar and et.al.,
2016).
In the first challenge that I undertook as per the university is the apprentice challenge
which was aimed at the development of team building skills through its various activities and
learnings. Apprentice challenge was undertaken by dividing all the students into teams. All the
teams were assigned a specific task of creating an innovating product idea to gain competitive
advantage and increase sales, marketing and overall brand equity (MacLellan and Koedinger,
2020). The product development was to be done by developing a prototype, had to be unique in
nature, needed to be innovative and creative, and had to completed under the given resources and
materials. The teams had to also devise marketing plans, advertisement idea, branding, estimate
profits, create budget and ultimately pitch the idea to the lecturers. I worked with a group size
consisting of 7 members from the same class as a part of the graduate challenge (Fearon and
3