MGT501 Business Environment: Reflection on Professional Degree Journey

This report presents a student's self-reflection on their motivation for pursuing a professional degree in business, focusing on self-awareness and career aspirations. The student utilizes the Driscoll reflective model (What? So what? Now what?) to analyze their past internship and current academic experiences, particularly in marketing and business development. They identify their long-term career goal of top-level management, emphasizing the need for enhanced skills in communication, negotiation, and leadership. The reflection outlines the student's expectations from the course, including skill development through various activities, and proposes a plan for monitoring progress using a Gantt chart. The student also sets short-term goals to improve communication and negotiation skills, aligning these with their overall career objectives. The report references relevant academic sources to support the analysis and provides a comprehensive overview of the student's professional development journey and future plans.

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Reflection on professional degree
Self-awareness is one of the essential aspects in order to learn and acknowledge
growth, which will be considered as part of discussion in this reflection. The key intention of
this discussion is decision making for the professional course that I intent to take as part of
my career development. Reflection is one of the ways to learn through experience, for which
there are various models propounded, like Driscoll reflective model. As per this model there
are three questions to carter that is What?, So what? And Now what?. These reflect the past
experience, the consequence and understanding, or learning from the experience and lastly
how the learning could be apply in future and what actions are going to be taken in near
future (Bailey, 2018).
As per my knowledge from past internship experience and current academic
experience, business is the trading of goods and services for exchange of money with the key
purpose to provide goods to the society and earn revenue. Business reflects any transactions
and various functions are integrated as part of business. These functions include the
management of various activities and resources as the economic principles reflect the
business resources to be used optimally due to limited resources available and gap between
demand and supply. The business is influenced by the external and internal environment,
which includes various forces. Like the internal forces include customers, suppliers,
distributors and market intermediaries which are directly associated with the business
strategic decision making. On the other hand, external suppliers include political, social,
technological, economic forces (Peters & Ryan, 2015).
The key reason for selection of this course is because of professional learning and
enhances managerial knowledge. My eventual goal for my career is to be part of top level
management, for which I need to gain knowledge and skills to manage human resources,

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financial resources, operational resources, and most importantly possess leadership skills. As
per the analysis, I understand that through professional degree I would get the exposure in
management field through practicing various workshops, classroom activities, live projects,
and assignments (Hall, Horgan, & Murphy, 2019).
From my past experience the area in management which I found most interesting is
marketing and business development. I personally believe that understanding consumers and
inducing them to purchase goods or services over other is a talent. Other than that, it can be
said that the actual trading can only be done through this field. Marketing includes activities
from researching the consumer needs and offering them with the products that will add value
to the consumers. This also includes promotion of brand and products (Carton, 2014).
My current academic profile and past experience in internship could help me and
guide me towards being a marketing manager and peruse for this course. From the current
study I am able to gain knowledge of environmental forces where consumer behaviour has
also been studied. Moreover, I have been in interaction with consumers directly as part of my
internship. Moreover, I have able to improve my time management through my current
experience which could also be helpful in being prepared for this course (Brooks & Normore,
2015).
It is relevant to know if the course will actually be able to meet my actual goals or
outcomes that I am looking for. I am looking towards enhancing my communication skills,
negotiation skills and leadership skills. I will ensure to get these skills through practicing
them throughout the course. This could be done by actively participating in class interactions,
and taking assignments as part of acquiring experience. Moreover, for managing and
monitoring the successful conclusion of the course considered. This will be done by
monitored on time span basis that is one the weekly basis. This will be done through

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application of Gantt chart that is to consider timeline and schedule the weekly objectives
(Brandon-Jones, 2018).
The last stage of the reflect model is to understand the actions to be take in future. For
this, it can be said that the studies that I am going to gain from the degree. After this course,
the knowledge and skills that I enhanced and gain from this experience will be using it in the
corporate life that I am willing to pursue. Initially this may initiate from the lower level
managerial position, but my long term goal is to achieve top level management positioning in
the top corporate companies (Birasnav, 2014).
The goals, as mentioned previously, long term goal is to become effective
entrepreneur and top level manager. However, the long term goals are not achieved
immediately, thus it is important to create short term goals in order to keep the knowledge
and skills in check and in practice to directed towards reaching of the actual long term goal
(Finne, 2017). This includes
Effective communication – I believe that my personal interaction with an individual is
good and effective, but I lack in group interactions as I am somewhat an introvert personality,
and does not take initiative to start communication or the discussion, for this I will be
attempting to take initiative in class room interactions and will work for this goal to be
achieved in next seven months (Andersson, 2016).
Negotiation skills – this include the skills to negotiate and keeping your point of view
at the pace so as to make the other party induced to change the decision in favour of you. I
will be able to practice this through conflict solving in the university among the groups and
through role plays. This is important in order to direct towards customer relationship and
customer management. Thus these skills will help me with my long term goal of being
marketing manager (Baron & Mueller, 2016).

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References
Andersson, R. (2016). Communication professionals: Important Internal Agents for Realizing
Strategy Processes within the Organization. In ECREA, 1.
Bailey, C. (2018). Strategic human resource management. Oxford University Press,.
Baron, R., & Mueller, B. (2016). Self-efficacy and entrepreneurs' adoption of unattainable
goals: The restraining effects of self-control. Journal of Business Venturing, 31(1),
55.
Birasnav, M. (2014). Knowledge management and organizational performance in the service
industry: The role of transformational leadership beyond the effects of transactional
leadership. . Journal of Business Research,, 67(8), 1622-1629.
Brandon-Jones, A. (2018). Operations and process management: principles and practice for
strategic impact. UK: Pearson.
Brooks, J., & Normore, A. (2015). Qualitative research and educational leadership: Essential
dynamics to consider when designing and conducting studies. International Journal
of Educational Management, 29(7), 798-806.
Carton, A. (2014). A (blurry) vision of the future: How leader rhetoric about ultimate goals
influences performance. Academy of Management Journal, 57(6), 1544-1570.
Finne, A. (2017). Communication-in-use: customer-integrated marketing communication.
European Journal of Marketing, 51(3), 445.
Hall, J., Horgan, T., & Murphy, N. (2019). Nonverbal communication. Annual review of
psychology, 70, 271-294.

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Peters, K., & Ryan, M. (2015). The motivational theory of role modeling: How role models
influence role aspirants’ goals. Review of General Psychology, 465.