Reflective Essay

To be a director of a ‘company’ as well as a college student made my life busy and exciting; it was undeniable that I’ve grown a lot professionally, but at the same time, it also brought me many questions – what is my career objective? How can i achieve it? What are my weaknesses and strength? Where do i need to improve?

A look back in time, I’ve made numbers of decisions about the business, some of them seems childish (now I look back on it) but I did done my best. This reflects the way that I consider things is quite different from the way I thought things at that time; in this case, I would go further and say this changing process is a benefit of personal and professional development (CIPD website, 2011). Although I am not currently employed, my previous working experience can still offer me opportunity to apply new theories that I’ve learned from business school in real-world situations that I’ve experienced. However, to make this progress more efficient and effectiveness, the ability of review and reflection are required. On top of that, to ensure that my personal development ongoing, I also need additional skills to support it, such as targets setting, proper mentoring and career planning skill.

I consider personal and professional development aspect of career management skills is significant not only because this skill is bridging the past experience and present learning together, more importantly, it is about setting the stage for future improvement since we are in a fast changing business environment, although my careers may change, but the personal and professional development can allow me to learn and improve quickly to adapt the fast changing business world.

However, although the long-term self-development is important for my future career, but back to reality, before achieve my long-term objective, I still need sufficient career management skills to allow me reach a job after I graduate. Hence certain pre-employment skills are required.

While I was running my business as a director, I also take part in the recruitment of staff. Previously I used to deal with two distinct kinds of candidates: the first group of candidates has strong and competitive CVs that are well organized and easy to follow, which gave me high expectations. But unfortunately most of them were disappointed me to some extent – either shown lack of skills or ability to meet my expectation during the interview or a giving assessment. Interestingly, the second group of candidates was exact opposite; their CVs were weak and unlikely to get a reply in a real world. However, they impressed me with their favourable performance in the following interview