Introduction:

The necessity of career planning and professional development cannot be undermined by any individual in any circumstance and these factors become crucial objectives before graduation. In the following assessment, I would attempt at evaluating the industry in which I want to pursue a career alongside reflecting on the type of organization I would like to work in. A specific yet brief outline of my employment plan before graduation would also be highlighted in the assessment. Another crucial task in the following assessment would be an insightful reflection into my existing professional skill set along with a review of various critical incidents experienced by me and the application of my skills for resolving any setbacks. The final task would be directed towards using the reflection on my professional skill and competency set to develop an action plan. The action plan would be equally directed towards my career development as well as personal development through establishing objectives for capitalizing on my strengths and working towards improvising on my weaknesses. The significance of an action plan for personal and professional development could be observed in the facility for monitoring an individual’s progress in personal and professional development with employability skills.

Task 1

Organizational Analysis:

Organizational analysis has been prominently associated with the identification of the existing skill needs of an organization. This is important for graduates in order to compare their existing skillset with the skill set required by a particular industry or organization to land up the right job. As per Alexiev et al (2016), organizations in almost every industry rely on a set of essential skills that are needed for people to work in a specific environment (Alexiev et al., 2016). Therefore, if I evaluate the marketing industry in general to obtain an impression of the skills required in the industry for prolific employment opportunities then it would help in obtaining a clear impression of the different ways in which I could strengthen my career opportunities.

Marketing industry:

The history of marketing could be easily traced back to ancient Greek and Roman civilizations when merchants sold their goods on different stalls in the market while communicating with different passersby to convince them for purchasing their goods. However, the traders of that time must not have considered these activities as marketing and the marketing industry noted prominently in current times found its roots in the industrial revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries. The industrial revolution was a period of intense social change supported by rapid improvements in science and technology. The different factors such as increasing mass media, mass production and large scale improvements in transportation infrastructure led to the creation of the necessity for sophisticated approaches to managing the distribution of goods. The changing phases of the market industry saw the evolution of many issues over the course of almost three centuries since the 18th century till the 21st century (Abbott, Green & Keohane, 2016). Initially, the orientation of marketing was primarily directed towards resolving issues such as opening new markets and reducing distribution costs in order to provide consumers with goods that they can afford. 

The start of the twentieth century witnessed a gradually escalating intensity of competition that was subsequently reflected on the transition of marketing objectives towards sales. This period was considerably associated with higher production and marketing measures were designed accordingly in order to deal with distribution, communication and persuasion of consumers about the superiority of a particular manufacturer over the other (Biermann, 2017). The gradual saturation of markets following the 1960s led to intensifying of competition for customers and this marketing was primarily introduced as a strategic department in the organizations. Marketing personnel are responsible for dictating the type of products and services to be manufactured by an organization, places of distribution, measures of promotion and pricing of the products and services. This presents a clear impression of the significance of marketing in the sustainability of organizations as well as the prospects of a career in a marketing job role. Another particular trend that has been noted in marketing is the shifting focus towards digitalization and the integration of various digital forms of marketing such as social media marketing, online marketing and mobile marketing. 

Organization type:

In order to start my employment after graduation, I would prefer to work for a small or medium enterprise after comparing the advantages and disadvantages of doing the same. Small or medium enterprises are generally characterized with an employee strength ranging within 250 that can provide a working environment without too much clutter and competition or a casual, underperforming workplace (Cai et al., 2016). The primary reasons for selecting a small or medium enterprise in the marketing industry could be largely directed towards the prospects for career development, improvement of personal and professional skills, opportunities for client-facing roles and inferences regarding adaptability and responsiveness to change. I could improve my skills in an SME through a better understanding of my job role alongside capitalizing on the grooming opportunities for my overall skill set through the first-hand on-the-job experience of the job and industry. 

Marketing personnel in SMEs are generally placed in direct contact with clients that can help me in perceiving the variation in client requirements to understand the process of developing appropriate solutions for different problems (Josefy et al., 2015). The flexible work policies of a small or medium enterprise would help me in carrying out my work responsibilities according to my capacities in the organization alongside responding to change in the most effective way. The flexibility in policies and regulations of small and medium enterprises would also improve my capabilities of dealing with changes in the workplace and develop necessary competencies for responding to change in my future career initiatives. 

Employment plan after graduation:

The prolific opportunities that are visible from an evaluation of the marketing industry’s significance and trends as well as the advantages of working for a small or medium organization can be accounted as the foundation for my employment plan after graduation. The preparatory phase for my employment plan would be outlined in the following tasks which are a reflection on my existing skill sets and their relevant applications which I have been able to make in different critical scenarios (Kolk, 2016). 

Furthermore, I would have to outline an action plan which for the time being would be dedicated to the improvement of the essential skills required for employment in the marketing industry which also include my personal skills. The action plan would have to be changed subsequently with my career progression according to the objectives. The other aspects that would be included in my employment plan after graduation would be professional networking and posting job applications on different small and medium scale organizations’ websites as well as job searching platforms. These initiatives could help me in securing a productive career path in marketing. 

Task 2

Self-assessment:

Existing professional skills and competencies:

The essential skills which are required for employment include reading, writing, thinking, oral communication, and numeracy skills, working with others, computer use, continuous learning and document use. These competencies are basic requirements of every organization in the marketing industry with an explicit focus on communication, cognitive reasoning, continuous learning and capabilities for working with others considering the present trends aligned with the digital transformation of the marketplace. A clear evaluation of my personal skill set with the present requirements of skills in particular for the marketing industry would provide valuable inputs for my employment plan as well as personal and professional development plan (Nica, Hurjui & Stefan, 2016). The industry-specific skills which would be required in a profession in a marketing role include teamwork, communication, problem-solving, IT and numeracy skills, enterprise and initiative and planning and organization. The only two additional skills which are observed in the case of the marketing profession are enterprise and initiative and planning and organization. I would utilize my personal intuition and knowledge in order to present an assessment of my existing skills and competencies to find out the scope for improvement to deal with future career opportunities. 

I am fluent in non-verbal communication as I have been able to observe from my abilities in completing my academic assignments according to the prescribed format. Furthermore, I have also written applications and other official documents during group activities such as mock interviews and group discussions. As I received feedback from my tutors and peers regarding my non-verbal communication skills, I found various opportunities for refining these skills further to achieve perfection.  

Our tutor guided collaborative learning in classroom activities which also aligns with social constructivism learning theory. I was able to learn from the reflection that I have to capitalize on my nonverbal communication skills in posting job applications and marketing myself to promising employers. The understanding of variations in formats for communicating nonverbally with the different audiences was also another crucial inference which I was able to derive by reflecting on my existing skills of nonverbal communication.

I was involved in various group activities throughout the course of my academic career. In one instance, I was selected as a group coordinator for a presentation on existing marketing trends in the smartphone industry. I was allocated to a team of four people and every one of them had different skill sets such as information gathering, documentation, and analysis and representation skills. I was able to work together with each one of them for identifying the possible contributions that they could make for the presentation in return for the promising returns of good grades. This event was also associated with extensive planning, goal setting and performance reviews within our team. 

We were able to deliver an appreciable presentation on the assigned topic. Thus I could be able to learn the importance of teamwork in getting the work done alongside recognizing the specific pointers that can help in obtaining the most promising result possible. The other outcomes which I was able to observe from this activity included possibilities for improvement in verbal communication alongside the requirement of professional training in the development of confidence for speaking in a group. I was also able to observe that I have effectiveness in numeracy and cognitive skills through my involvement in preparing necessary information for the presentation through using raw data compiled by team members.  

Analysis of critical incidents:

I should also reflect on certain critical incidents in order to determine the feasibility of applying my existing skills and competencies in a marketing job role. One of the critical incidents was during a classroom activity in which our tutor had asked us to compile recent data on customer behaviour trends in different industries. I had compiled data regarding customer behaviour only in selected industries such as the automobile, FMCG and smartphone industries (Winkler & Marshall, 2017). However, the tutor was not able to evaluate my report due to the lack of coherence in the data presented in the reports. This factor reflected clearly on my insufficiencies in terms of planning and organization. I had not given effort in organizing the data from different reports and at certain places, the report had data from the different industries intermixed together. My tutor recommended me to attempt the assignment again and based on his feedback I was able to learn essential skills of planning and organization such as prioritization of tasks, goal setting and evaluation of essential requirements for a specific task. These skills would be essential in the job role of a marketing assistant or marketing manager in order to organize market research information and derive essential recommendations for the organization’s marketing objectives.  

Another crucial incident that was associated with my professional and personal skill development in my academic career was the project for developing a mobile app for an eCommerce store (Ulmer & Pyle, 2016). This incident enabled me to work on the technicalities of an app and its various implications for an organization’s target audience and existing customer base. 

On the basis of feedback from other project team members as well as the evaluators, I was able to recognize the inherent ability for innovation and the final outcome in terms of a working and comprehensive app validated my ability for translating an idea into reality. My tutors and peers provided recommendations for working in different stages of innovation learning in order to refine my capabilities for enterprise and initiative. I was able to learn from this incident that the confidence to turn ideas into action can act as a potential contributor to the improvement in my skills for enterprise and initiative in marketing roles (Sedera, Gronau & Sumner, 2015). I could be able to use my skills in numeracy and information collecting as well as cognitive reasoning to support various causes of enterprise and initiative in my different professional roles in marketing. For example, I utilized my numeracy skills and organization abilities in the design of the application through designing the inventory database for the store. In other instances, I was able to utilize cognitive reasoning to find the most flexible and easy as well as creative solutions to different problems in my academic assignments. Furthermore, I was able to utilize my numeracy skills to my advantage in a group project for a presentation on where a problematic situation developed due to an error by a team member in compiling the quantitative data thereby leading to a faulty outcome. I took the initiative of reviewing the issue and finding out the exact places where my team member had made errors after which I utilized my skills in quantitative data compilation and knowledge of appropriate tools such as SPSS for numeric data and obtained reliable insights from them.  

Task 3:

Personal and Professional Development Program:

Action Plan:

My action plan for employment would be initiated with a personal development plan which would be based on outcomes from SWOT analysis. My SWOT analysis could be presented as a table in appendix I. The other two tools which I used for self-analysis included a self-assessment rubric and a checklist which are outlined in Appendix II and Appendix III. The self-assessment tool of SWOT analysis helped me prominently in evaluating my personal competencies. I was able to focus on the reasons for gaps in my professional skills as well as the underlying factors in my personal attributes responsible for the gaps. I was able to learn that I did not have substantial fluency in verbal communication and the limitations imposed on my productivity by procrastination. Furthermore, I was able to reflect on the opportunities that are available to me as a student for engaging in personal and professional development for my future career. I was also able to notice the potential threat of increasing pressure from academic tasks and professional undertakings in future for the scope of my personal and career development. 

Based on the reflection on my existing skillset and the crucial incidents that reflected on my weaknesses and threats to personal development, I was able to outline specific objectives to ensure my personal development. 

• Reduce procrastination in different projects
• Improve verbal communication ability through understanding the use of body language of people
• Improving an organized and comprehensive awareness of existing as well as emerging trends in marketing for a better understanding of the industry
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Evidence of progress:

The success of my action plan would be particularly dependent on certain criteria which can act as benchmarks for success in my career. The different components in my action plan alongside the activities would have to be aligned with particular metrics in order to determine the progress in my personal and professional development (Ulmer & Pyle, 2016). For example, feedback regarding my verbal communication abilities in group and interpersonal settings could be a reliable metric to evaluate the improvement in my ability for understanding verbal cues. I would be using different metrics for measuring my progress in each of the three objectives outlined above in my action plan. 

The foremost activity in my action plan would be to ensure the limitations over different redundant activities in my daily routine not only with respect to my academic environment but also on a personal level. I would plan out my day in a timely manner with different activities assigned to each part of the day. This would enable me to sense the important things alongside realizing the evils of procrastination for productivity. Furthermore, I would aim at personal rewards for accomplishing tasks according to specific deadlines (Winkler & Marshall, 2017). The specific tools which I can use for measuring my progress include the comparison of dates of completing various assigned tasks as well as a checklist of all the everyday activities in my personal life. These activities would not only contribute to the reduction of procrastination but also contribute to improvement in planning and organization skills. 

I would also have to work on my verbal communication skills in my action plan. The specific initiatives in which I can aim at accomplishing this objective include participation in different public speaking events as well as conferences and seminars. This would help in observing the body language of the different speakers alongside improving perception of other crucial factors in verbal communication such as clarity, diction and tone of voice. Frequent formal discussions with colleagues and friends could also be productive interventions in my action plan for improving verbal communication abilities. Another significantly promising activity that can be implemented in my action plan is participation in group activities beyond the classroom such as in community events as well as volunteering and charity organization work (Ulmer & Pyle, 2016). These events would provide the opportunity to interact with various types of audiences thereby helping in a considerable understanding of variations in body language. As discussed previously, feedback from recipients of my verbal communication would be the sole metric for measuring improvement in my action plan. 

The final objective of my action plan to have an intensive and accurate knowledge of the current and emerging trends in marketing could be accomplished through a study plan. This study plan would include distinct activities for collecting information from various sources such as textbooks, online journals, research publications and news articles about marketing. A detailed review of these materials would be a crucial support in improving my awareness of the marketing industry in order to address all required roles and responsibilities in the marketing profession. 

The details in the action plan that would be useful to me in the course of my future career development include insights into my behavioural traits such as emotional intelligence and values as well as motivations. The effectiveness of the action plan would be dependent on my dedication to the implementation of all outlined activities and following the necessary measurement criteria. However, the action plan not only relies on the study of concepts and theory pertaining to personal development and career progression but also on the facilities for practising the skill areas in which I observed insufficiencies. For example, the participation in volunteering activities organized by different communities in the university could help me in interacting with students from different educational backgrounds and cultures. This would contribute to my intercultural adaptability skills alongside improving my abilities for the formation of a team as well as understanding the requirements of team members effectively in future employment roles. I could be able to practice more on my numeric and IT use skills in the activity for improving awareness about the marketing industry. Another useful detail in the action plan that would be highly beneficial for my career development is the reduction of procrastination that can be subsequently helpful in promising outcomes for time management skills. For example, if I am able to reduce my time spent on redundant activities then I would be able to plan my schedule for the day accordingly to prevent any loss of time. These significantly useful pointers from my action plan could not only help me in accomplishing the short term objectives outlined in the action plan but also for long term outcomes in my career development. I could also be able to capitalize on the action plan for my personal development by focusing on the improvement of my values, personal beliefs, learning styles and motivations.    

Conclusion:

The assessment presented above emphasized on improving the prospects for my career development. The crucial aspect of this assessment was a reflection on the reasons for selecting the marketing industry and a small or medium scale organization for my future career alongside my existing skills and learning outcomes from critical incidents. Finally, the report presents an action plan for my career development along with the activities as well as metrics to observe the progress of my action plan. 

References

Alexiev, A. S., Volberda, H. W., & Van den Bosch, F. A. (2016). Interorganizational collaboration and firm innovativeness: Unpacking the role of the organizational environment. Journal of Business Research, 69(2), 974-984.

Abbott, K. W., Green, J. F., & Keohane, R. O. (2016). Organizational ecology and institutional change in global governance. International Organization, 70(2), 247-277.

Biermann, F. (2017). A World Environment Organization: solution or threat for effective international environmental governance?. Routledge.

Cai, S., Cai, W., Deng, L., Cai, B., & Yu, M. (2016). Hospital organizational environment and staff satisfaction in China: A large‐scale survey. International journal of nursing practice, 22(6), 565-573.

Josefy, M., Kuban, S., Ireland, R. D., & Hitt, M. A. (2015). All things great and small: Organizational size, boundaries of the firm, and a changing environment. The Academy of Management Annals, 9(1), 715-802.

Kolk, A. (2016). The social responsibility of international business: From ethics and the environment to CSR and sustainable development. Journal of World Business, 51(1), 23-34.

Nica, E., Hurjui, I., & Stefan, I. G. (2016). The Relevance of the Organizational Environment in Workplace Bullying Processes. Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics, 4(2), 83.

Winkler, M., & Marshall, E. (2017). Creating and shaping the organizational environment and culture to support practice excellence. Transformational leadership in nursing: From expert clinician to influential leader, 247-267.

Ulmer, R. R., & Pyle, A. S. (2016). International Organizational Crisis Communication. The handbook of international crisis communication research, 43, 108.

Sedera, D., Gronau, N., & Sumner, M. (Eds.). (2015). Enterprise Systems. Strategic, Organizational, and Technological Dimensions: International Workshops, Pre-ICIS 2010, St. Louis, MO, USA, December 12, 2010, Pre-ICIS 2011, Shanghai, China, December 4, 2011, and Pre-ICIS 2012, Orlando, FL, USA, December 16, 2012, Revised Selected Papers (Vol. 198). Springer.