Professional Development Reflection of Project Manager

The business acumen for project manager course taught me how to improve my instincts as a business person. In the leadership skills for the future course, I learned about the different leadership styles and their effectiveness. The Launching your product course taught me how to manage the development and launch of a product. I learned how one can innovate while taking into account potential risks to the organization in the course on balancing innovation and risk. In addition, I learned more about risk management approaches in the risk management course. The consumer behaviour course taught me how to apply Neuroscience to understand customers. The business analytics course taught me the utility of data and approaches to analysing data. I learned how to develop and pen down a marketing plan in the How to write a marketing plan course. The course on the basics of project management taught me how to oversee a project. I acquired essential knowledge on the digital transformation of an organization in effectively leading a digital transformation course. The Mastering Common Interview Questions course taught me the potential questions that candidates face in job interviews and how to respond to such questions.                                          Professional Development Reflection I feel that I have gained essential knowledge and skills from the professional development activities that I have engaged in. The ‘pitch’ group task that was a part of the mandatory professional development activities taught me the process of developing a pitch. The tasks required us to prepare a pitch for Weare8 social media. From there, we had to identify a potential area of improvement that the social media platform could implement to improve its performance in the market (Sabaj et al., 2020). My participation in the project impressed upon me the need to conduct extensive research before developing a pitch. That is, the pitch has to identify and address a gap that would be of help to the audience (Sabaj et al., 2020). In addition to learning the need for research skills, the ‘pitch’ group task taught me the need to acquire writing skills. The nature of the pitch requires information to be condensed into a presentation that can be made to the target audience within a short time (Sabaj et al., 2020). As such, we had to condense the number of words that we used so that we had a pitch that could be presented to the target audience at a moment’s notice. As a business and marketing student, the ability to research a given topic and express the findings using brief words is an essential skill. In such a way, the “pitch” task was essential to my professional development. The employability and guest lecture activities also taught me a lot. In most business programs, the focus of learning is theoretical knowledge leading to a situation where a student spends significant time figuring out how to translate it into practical knowledge. Guest lecture activities provided me with the opportunity to test how my theoretical knowledge was measured with the real-world scenario in the sense that I could ask the guests questions about their experiences. The interaction with the guest lecturer allowed me to determine the areas of learning that I should focus on so that I could enhance my employability (Nisha & Rajasekaran, 2018). For example, my decision to learn more about data analytics was informed by a guest lecturer who emphasized the increasing relevance of data analytics across all areas of business. I also gained insight from employability activities on the areas I should work on to improve my suitability in the job market (Nisha & Rajasekaran, 2018). In such a way, the guest lecture and employability activity were significantly insightful. San Francisco and France virtual field trips were highly insightful to me as a business and marketing student. The virtual field trip offered me the opportunity to explore the two locations from the comfort of my classroom. The use of virtual tours is increasing in significance in marketing (Voronkova, 2018). As such, I gained insight into the logistics of virtual field trips as well as the real-life world experience from the activity. As a marketer, I intend to leverage my experience from the virtual field trip to integrate the use of virtual tours in professional marketing. The choice of optional professional development activities was largely driven by the extent to which I felt a given optional course would enhance my employability. The business acumen for project manager course taught me how to make business decisions that set up a company for success (Jewell et al., 2020). With the course, I feel that I have the essential skills to analyse an opportunity and determine how it is likely to impact the performance of the company. The leadership skills for the future course taught me the essential elements of a business leader. To this end, the course taught me how I can motivate my subordinates to work together towards a common goal. Product management is one of the essential roles of marketing managers. The Launching your product course was essential as it taught me how one should approach the process of launching new products in a company. The course on balancing innovation and risk taught me how to pursue innovation without placing the company at a risk (Valdez-Juárez, García-Pérez-de-Lema, & Maldonado-Guzmán, 2018). In the same vein, the risk management course taught me the various model and approaches that an organization can reliably use to manage risk for an organization. Several courses were essential to enhancing my knowledge as a marketer. The consumer behaviour course reiterated the need for a marketer to remain apprised of consumer behaviour and how it affects marketing decisions. To this end, the course taught me how the field of Neuroscience can be leveraged to understand consumer behaviours. The Business Analytics course was one of the most insightful courses that I learned during my professional development. To this end, the course highlighted the increasing utility of data and introduced some of the approaches that can be used to analyse the data. I feel that the course will be essential to my professional performance as long as I can deepen my skills in the area (Alshura, Zabadi, & Abughazaleh, 2018). The course on how to write a marketing plan was also essential to my future career as a marketer. To this end, the course taught me the essential elements of a marketing plan and how one should integrate the elements. The course on the basics of project management was also insightful as a business and marketing professional should be able to oversee a project (Wen & Qiang, 2019). To this end, the course taught me the tools such as work breakdown structure that can be effectively leveraged to enhance project management. In addition, the course on effectively leading a digital transformation was insightful to me as a business and marketing student. The knowle...