Selection Criteria Employability Skills
Selection Criteria: Employability Skills
Institutional Affiliation
Date
Selection Criteria: Employability Skills
Introduction
My field placement activities and work engagements provided an invaluable forum me to learn and depict the essential employability skills that I should possess and demonstrate towards shaping my career branding and sustaining my future career. Ariu et al. (2015) and Römgens et al. (2020) suggest that employability skills encompasses the abilities, skillsets, understanding, personal characteristics, and knowledge indispensable in equipping me to gain initial occupation, sustain that employment, and subsequently attain new occupations if necessary. Drawing on my learning and skill development experiences, I reflect on, synthesise, and respond to three selection criteria that highlight these employability skills in enabling my employability. The three selection criteria or employability skills I have selected to respond to are the demonstration of the capacity to communicate effectively, the display of good time management and organisational skills, and the proven ability to work as part of a team.
I decided to respond to demonstrating the aptitude to communicate effectively because this employability skill tops every employers’ hiring requirements. From a critical stance, strong communication skills traverse all domains of personal and professional life and all other aspects that fall in between, underscoring the value of this skill in all career dimensions. I chose to respond to my exhibition of good time management and organisational skills because I feel that this is the area where I witnessed a real growth challenge during my field placement. Lastly, I opted to respond to the proven ability to work in a team setting because I anticipate that my forthcoming career will highly characterise teamwork activities. I examined and respond to these selection criteria based on the STAR model that offers a framework for presenting information against each selection criterion as proof of how I demonstrated these employability skills.
Demonstrating the Capacity to Communicate Effectively
During my field placement, I enhanced my communication skills by gaining and exhibiting the capacity to communicate seamlessly, with influence, and effectively with multidisciplinary professionals within the work environment. In my role as a full-time onsite logistics intern, I undertook routine tasks and activities that required my constant interaction and communication with these individuals, thereby learning how to communicate effectively. For example, I ensured that my supervisors were kept well-informed of the welfare of my colleagues, who were majorly interns.
Another example of the actions I undertook to demonstrate effective communication involved drafting a detailed monthly work progress report for the departmental manager, after being asked to compile it by my immediate supervisor. As a part of the loading team where we did manual handling tasks, I ensured that I clarified the occupational safety measures and precautions that my fellow interns had to observe, as Stewart et al. (2018) advocate. Moreover, as their leader, I demonstrated the capacity to communicate effectively by constantly and concisely liaising with my supervisors on the daily activities that these interns had to accomplish. Furthermore, I promptly informed the supervisor of any requests from my colleagues to be absent from work, giving detailed reports about the reasons for their absence. Apart from that, I actively listened to work instructions from my supervisors and relayed the same directives to the interns under my leadership with clarity and concision. This was important in ensuring that job-related tasks were accomplished efficiently (Bucăţa & Rizescu, 2017) and according to the outlined guidelines and timelines. Lastly, I always ensured that I conveyed work-related feedback and updates from my supervisors to my fellow interns about their accomplishments to keep them motivated and enhance their morale.
Following my involvement in these communication activities, I received consistently excellent commendation and comments from my supervisors and manager regard the report I compiled and my team communication and leadership capabilities. I also received a departmental recommendation for this work excellence. Besides, I have built my experience and knowledge of prioritising communication towards facilitating efficient task accomplishment, agile team functioning, and better project collaboration.
Good Organisational and Time Management Skills
In my role and reasonability as the interns’ leader, developing my organising and time management skills was of great importance. So, I leveraged the work organisation challenges and opportunities presented to me within this internship environment to enhance these skills and build my capacity to be an effective organiser and time manager. I accomplished this through several activities.
The first action encompassed participating in programme alignment duties to line up my placement department’s project schedules, calendar events (training conferences and workshops for interns), and task deadlines. This engagement enhanced my organisation skills by enabling me to ensure that the team of interns under my leadership never missed critical dates and scheduled activities, had improved workflows (Wang & Lin, 2019), and operated under minimal stress. The second activity involved collaborating with supervisors and interns in working out task plans. In our context, these plans were pre-set workflow programmes indispensable in enabling us as individuals and groups to observe a predefined work order to minimise time wasting. In designing these task plans, I participated in several organising activities that included determining specific tasks via brainstorming, identifying proper task accomplishment objectives, gathering inputs from the interns, designating tasks for each individual and group, designing the task plan template, organising its content, and updating the task plans.
The third activity was where I worked with the interns’ supervisors in developing and implementing a time management plan. We designed it based on the contents of the tasks plans. My organising tasks in developing this time management plan involved prioritising, sorting, and sequencing activities, mapping them out in a clearly drawn timetable, defining task delegation criteria, and aligning the mapped tasks with the anticipated outcomes. I assessed interns’ technical abilities to understand those who qualified better for specific delegations activities within tasks and projects.
The outcomes of engaging in these organisational and time management activities are that I augmented my knowledge to plan and prioritise my team’s workload. This enabled us to deliver in time and complete our job-related tasks and assignments autonomously and proficiently with limited supervision. Additionally, I managed to witness minimal anxiety and stress associated with too much procrastination of my work-associated tasks.
The Proven Ability to Work as Part of a Team
Throughout my field placement, I acknowledged that the obvious approach to enhancing my teamwork skills is to be part of a proactive, energetic, and motivated team. Fay et al. (2015) and Sanyal and Hisam (2018) verify my stance, submitting that working in a team environment provides many opportunities to grow in collaborative working. These authors further delineate the benefits of team working, which include improved operational efficiency, the emergence of new and innovative ideas, work quality betterment, and organisational innovation enhancement.
Serving as the interns’ team leader in my field placement company allowed me to engage in some activities that evinced my growing capability to work as part of a team. The first of these activities was to actively participate in the firm’s teambuilding exercises established for our department. I recall taking part in three teambuilding exercises: the Human knot (designed as a fun activity), circles of appreciations, and idea workshops. These teambuilding activities gave me the opportunity to foster communication and camaraderie with my colleagues and our seniors (the supervisors). The second action was to serve as the source of support for my colleagues by sharing information promptly and clearly, guiding them in attaining their goals, and delivering timely, positive, and constructive feedback. Furthermore, I engaged in prioritising my team by recognising and communicating interns’ needs with my supervisors and sharing in their success by acknowledging their collective effort in accomplishing job assignments. Lastly, I took the initiative as the team leader to design, implement, and participate in team bonding activities such as hosting brainstorming sessions, board games, and solving brainteasers (Ektuna & Van Heel, 2017) for enhancing higher brainstorming and thinking towards effective problem-solving.
Through these teambuilding and team bonding activities, I steered my team of interns towards adopting an excellent team spirit while enhancing their capacity to sustain close-knit work relationships. Another outcome was that such actions allowed me to nurture an atmosphere of loyalty and congeniality among the interns. This was crucial in motivating cooperation, commitment, supportive functioning, and accountability among the interns in my team. Lastly, working as part of a team increased my reliability in completing assignments with higher consistency and enhanced flexibility of adapting to changes in my work environment.
Conclusion
As I look back at my placement experiences, I admit that my employability skills have grown substantially. In the area of communication, I have gained important insights into my capacity to leverage effective communication to enhance the engagement, commitment, and productivity of those under my leadership in the workplace. Effective communication is indispensable in augmenting the overall effectiveness and performance of my team because it influences teambuilding and team bonding initiatives. Concerning working as part of a team, I have gain a valuable lesson. The lesson is that the team leader should go beyond demonstrating effective communication skills to engaging in consensus decision-making, openness, leader visibility, and practicing healthy interactions and engagement that foster growth to drive results.
I have also gained new knowledge regarding sound organisational and time management skills. Specifically, I have better understood that proper organisation and time management improves both my job accomplishment behaviours and my entire career position. Also, my field placement experiences have allowed me to comprehend that adequate organisational and time management skills are essential in stimulating group and individual creativity, proactivity, and resourcefulness, leading to effective goal realisation. I am now well-informed that excellent organisational and time management abilities are the foundation for proper task prioritisation, work-related stress reduction, effective delegation, and effecting planning, invaluable in driving individual and group effectiveness.
My placement experiences and activities have brought visible improvements in my knowledge and overall employability skill level. This is relevant to my future studies and career because it equips me with the aptitude to cultivate feasible approaches and methods of facing and coping with career-specific challenges and issues that might arise in the future. My next step for your development after these placement experiences is to leverage networks of professionals in my discipline to discover my career and personal strengths and identify how to integrate them into my growth potential insights.
References
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Sanyal, S., & Hisam, M. W. (2018). The impact of teamwork on work performance of employees: A study of faculty members in Dhofar University. IOSR Journal of Business and Management, 20(3), 15-22. Doi: 10.9790/487X-2003011522.
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