Report on Skills Development: The Graduate Challenge at LSST

This report assesses the development of professional skills through a Graduate Challenge, focusing on experiences and beliefs gained from three challenges: an apprentice role at Tesco, a presentation challenge at the London School of Science and Technology (LSST), and a T-shirt launch challenge. The report highlights the development of key skills such as communication, teamwork, time management, and business acumen. Each challenge provided opportunities to enhance these skills, with specific examples provided for each. The apprentice challenge emphasized communication and time management, while the presentation challenge focused on teamwork and presentation skills. The T-shirt challenge centered on marketing and business strategies. The report concludes with an action plan for further developing communication skills, using the SMART framework, and emphasizes the importance of professional skills for career growth. Desklib offers similar resources for students seeking solved assignments and past papers.

Assessment -
The Graduate
challenge

INTRODUCTION
These are the abilities that are developed with the motive of achieving success in a job.
These describes the personality or habit that have a impact on the performance and can improve
the job performance when worked on. The person with good professional skills can succeed in
mostly every type of job and of any sector. Some of the common and most powerful professional
skills are – communication, team work and flexibility. Learning and adapting of these skills leads
to professional development. This also provides the user with a vision for success and leads to
the ladder of success (Sandri, Holdsworth and Thomas, 2018). The following report is based on a
assessment based on the experiences and beliefs and mainly involve three challenges and several
skills which were developed in order of completion of these challenges.
MAIN BODY
Apprentice Challenge :
In this challenge, I went to Tesco for getting the experience and learning the ways and
environemnt in which work is done is corporate offices. It was a hard challenge for me as I did
not have the habit of listening to orders and maintaining proper discipline and eticates. My side
going studies in the London School of Science and Technology (LSST) made it harder for me to
be consisted and on time. While undergoing this challenge, I developed many skills some of
which are discussed in the following points :
 Communication skills – This is a basic skill that helps a person to easily and effectively
deliver the information to others. On the first day of my work, I was very conscious and
nervous. There were many other people in office and I was not taking to any of them. But
the working environment of the company was very good and friendly. My colleagues and
seniors were helping me out and trying to make me feel comfortable (Stollenwerk, 2019).
This helped me a lot in building my communication skill and gradually I was the person
who had good relationships with mostly all the people and also dealing with the
customers effectively.
 Team work – This skills help in taking a group a people together and complete hard and
complex activities easily that were not possible to be done by an individual. When
working in this challenge, many people helped each other for completion of their
projects. There were also some projects that were big enough and urgent that were not

possible to be done by an individual. A group of people were provided with the project
and dividation was based on the skills and choices (Barua and Zou, 2021)).
 Time management skill – This skill tells about the efficient managing and dividation of
time. Presence of this skill help in maintaining and avoiding wastage of this. This also
promotes the discipline of a person. Due to the fix timing schedule of the office, I
developed this skill. This skill helps me in considering the best usage of my time.
 Business skills and competencies developed – This skills helps a person to be powerful
businessman. As a student, it was hard for me to focus on this skill but I was a business
lover from childhood and always wanted to develop the related skill. It involves various
abilities to be able compete in the world. The development of this skill helped me
effectively dealing with the clients. Through I was also able to take quick decisions.
Presentation Challenge
This is the process of delivering some kind of information to the available audience. In
my graduation from London School of Science and Technology (LSST), my whole class was
given a task of presenting a business plan in front of the entire school in teams of 5 people. As
the college is well known in the academic world the presentation must be of a high level and
better than other students. It was a inter school and some other college's students present. Giving
the presentation with the strong motive of getting appraisals and best marks in front of the
school, there were many skills that were developed, some of these are as follows :
 Communication skills – The communicating between the team was a small part of this
skill. The main development of the skill was in presenting the plan in front of the school.
I worked on identifying the way of presenting a lot. For this I practised in front of my
family and team. The development of this helped me a lot in easily and effectively
giving the presentation (Ruthotto, Kreth and Melkers, 2021).
 Team work - As it was a team task, the communication between the team was needed
to get with the best ideas. Different team members were given different position in the
presentation for making it more presentable. Every members was motivated to put their
ideas in front of the team. Through this skill I also learned to respect the opinion of
others and think from their perspective.
 Time Management skills- It was very important to manage the time as the duration
provided for preparation of the presentation was not much. It was a task analyse the time

by considering the other lectures and availability of team members. With the opinions of
all the team mates, a schedule was made and strictly followed to manage the time
perfectly. And this directly helped in developing this skill.
 Business skills and competencies developed – being a student it was a complex and
hard task for me to develop these skills. But while presenting the business plan it was
important to consider and study the different business related functions. The spectators
and judges were cross questioning (Lewis and McDonagh, 2019). The task of selling the
business plan to them was also provided by them. This helped me in developing this
skill.
T-Shirt Challenge :
In this challenge, the launch of a new t shirt was the provided task. A new t shirt was
entrusted to be launched with considering the demonstration of logo of the provided brand. The
role rendered to me was a new and different experience for me as I have not done anything
similar before. Getting through the process of completing this task I developed many skills
which are discussed in the following points :
 Communication skills – As the provided task of launching a new t – shirt was not easy.
The provided challenge helped me in developing the communication skill. I was provided
with the role of marketing the product / t-shirt in market. Marketing is a department that
have the most need of this skill to be able to make effective perspective of the product in
minds of the customers. I communicated with many new people to tell them about the
product and this has helped me vastly in developing the related skill.
 Team work – This skill was improved through working in a team in the marketing
department. The marketing is a vast department with many different functions and as the
challenge was on a big level, the marketing team was consisted of many people which
were further divided on different tasks. All the team members were working in co-
ordination to improve the quality of work and motivated to keep their thoughts in front of
the team (Mok and Jiang, 2018).
 Time Management skills – The duration provided by the company was limited. The
effective management of time was a compulsory task. All the members of the team were
given there separate tasks with a particular time limit. This helped in developing this skill
greatly.

 Business skills and competencies developed – While undergoing the task of launching
the t- shirt, principle of business were concerned. But being a participant in the marketing
department, the use of certain marketing strategies were needed to increase the sales
(Atta, 2021). The competition in the clothing market is also much, so several strategies
that could provide with a competitive advantage were also used and this helped me in
developing this skill.
Branding – While marketing the t-shirt in the market, I developed communication skill that
provided me with learning the branding of the product. As I had to deal with the customers, this
skills was essential and thus developed in the process.
Finance – The apprentice task helped me in developing the skill. As it was a paid apprentice, I
got my first chance to learn the ability of managing the money. This is a very important skill that
must be taught (Oliveira and et. al., 2019).
Operations – While working in the presentation task, there were several tasks that were needed to
done at the particular. Management of the team was also there. Through these tasks I learned the
skill of operations function.
Action Plan :
The goal for developing the communication skill was acronym as SMART that are defined in
following :
 Specific – The objective is to develop this skill to have a advantage in the world of
providing specific and clear information.
 Measurable – The development of this skill was clearly seen by other people.
 Achievable – From the starting of the task, I confirmed that the task is achievable to
make an improvement.
 Relevant – In order to ensure the reliability, certain certificates are needed to be
provided.
 Time frame – This skill will be acquired within 5 months
CONCLUSION
From the above report it has been concluded that, professional skill are the factors that
when developed provide with the benefits in the professional growth. There are some common

skills that help an individual in professional development in mostly every sector such as
communication and time management. All the challenges – apprentice, presentation and t-shirt
development involved the neediness of these common skills and when done in correct way
helped in development of these skills.

REFERENCES:
Books and Journals:
Sandri, O., Holdsworth, S. and Thomas, I., 2018. Assessing graduate sustainability capability
post-degree completion: Why is it important and what are the challenges?. International Journal
of Sustainability in Higher Education.
Stollenwerk, A., 2019. An Embedded Graduate Lab Course with Spirit. In Cyber Physical
Systems. Model-Based Design(pp. 247-263). Springer, Cham.
Barua, L. and Zou, B., 2021. ACRP Graduate Student Paper-Planning Maintenance and
Rehabilitation Actions for Airport Pavements: A Combined Supervised Machine Learning and
Reinforcement Learning Approach (No. TRBAM-21-04080).
Ruthotto, I., Kreth, Q. and Melkers, J., 2021. Entering or advancing in the IT labor market: The
role of an online graduate degree in computer science. The Internet and Higher Education,
p.100820.
Lewis, S. and McDonagh, V., 2019. Assessed seminars for pre-sessional international post-
graduate management studies.
Mok, K.H. and Jiang, J., 2018. Massification of higher education and challenges for graduate
employment and social mobility: East Asian experiences and sociological
reflections. International Journal of Educational Development. 63. pp.44-51.
Atta, S., 2021. Political Islam in Central Asia (The Challenge of Hizb ut-Tahrir). Graduate
Journal of Pakistan Review (GJPR). 1(1). pp.4-5.
Oliveira, L.M.L.D. And et. al., 2019. Evaluation of curriculum norms according to the National
Curriculum Guidelines for graduate studies in Dentistry.