The Business Skills Handbook

Roy Horn

• Publisher: CIPD - Kogan Page
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781843982180
• eBook ISBN: 9781843983392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

How do you develop leadership skills or give a successful presentation? What difference can effective thinking and critical reading make to your performance? How can you get and stay organized to meet deadlines? The first book of its kind to cover all the business skills that students need at university and at work, The Business Skills Handbook covers all the practical, cognitive, technical and development skills that students need to succeed, from organising life and work to developing good writing and teamwork skills.
Mapped to the learning outcomes of the CIPD Level 7 Advanced Developing Skills for Business Leadership module, and with a focus on experiential learning to get students assessing and developing their skills, The Business Skills Handbook is designed to help students manage themselves more effectively, make justifiable decisions and problem solve more effectively, lead and influence others, interpret financial information, manage financial resources, demonstrate IT proficiency and demonstrate competence in postgraduate study skills. Online supporting resources include an instructor's manual, lecture slides and figures and tables from the book.

CHAPTER 1

Organising Life and Work

What skills will I develop in this chapter?

•how to make effective use of time

•how to be effective by using ‘work breakdown charts’

•exploring and using ‘time lines’

•how to become an effective member of a study group

•how to get help from computer software

1.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter is the first chapter because it is the most important. It is possible to survive at university or at work with weak skills in certain areas, but being poorly organised is not one of them. Controlling, planning and organising your life and work are key skills that will significantly contribute to your success. Poor organisation will always affect the class of degree you achieve or the promotion you earn at work. If you accept this point, it follows logically that you need to get organised early. The skill of organisation will also serve you well in the workplace.

It is important to realise there are at least two types of organising. First, there is personal organising, where you control how you use the time available to you. Second, there is group or team organising; in the workplace this is a managerial task. How effective you are in your personal organisation will affect how much productive work you get out of 168 hours each week. If you are managing a small team of 12 people, all at work for 40 hours per week, your organisation skills will determine how much productive work you get out of 480 hours.

The best way to use this chapter is to read it fully and slowly, completing each of the activities as you work through the chapter. It would be ideal if you were able to use this chapter very early in your studies. But, also return to the chapter occasionally and reflect on whether there are any refinements that you can make to your organising and planning and the way you use time. It would also be useful to return to this chapter when you start your first full-time job.

1.2 MANAGING TIME

Time at university and work is exactly the same: you get 168 hours each week, no more, no less. You cannot save it and you cannot buy any more. Therefore, how you use it is vitally important to how effective you will be at work or university.

THE SWEET JAR THEORY OF TIME MANAGEMENT

Imagine a large sweet jar, the kind you find in old-fashioned sweet shops: they are about 400mm high and about 200mm in diameter. Take the jar and put as many chocolate oranges in the jar as will fit (so that you can still get the lid on). Now the jar is full – correct? Nothing else will fit!

Now take the ‘full jar’ and put as many chocolate M&M’s® into the jar as you can, really shake the jar and settle those sweets into it until you cannot get another one in – the jar really is full now, right?

Or is it?

Take a bag of sugar and tip in as much sugar as you can; you may need a second bag. Fill the jar to the brim – now is it full?

Now take that full jar and pour as much water into the jar as you can. The jar is full, so screw on the lid and take a look at that jar.

What does this exercise tell us about time?

Well, the chocolate oranges could represent the important tasks to be completed. We also have a number of other quite important tasks to do each day/week/year; these are represented by the chocolate M&M’s®. The sugar represents all the other smaller things that must get done every day/week/year. Finally, the water gets everywhere and gums up the works with a sticky sugary mess; this represents all the things that are not our priorities, but are the priorities of other people. The sugar and the water will combine so that you cannot see the sugar; it is dissolved in the water. The sugar represents all the daily tasks that must be done, such as buying food and milk. So when you are busy on the major tasks (chocolate oranges), you may find there is no food in the fridge or milk for a cup of tea.

None of the items in the jar are bad things and we will want a balance of things to do. It would be no use having only large, important things to do. But somehow we have to get the large items completed in order to say we have had a productive and effective day/week/year. It is also important to make use of the small spaces of time to do tasks if we are going to use time effectively – more on this later.

What does this little exercise tell us about time management?

•We only have room for so many chocolate oranges – large, high-priority tasks (your university coursework, study, examinations, work).

•Large tasks can be turned into smaller tasks and fitted more easily into the time available (the chocolate orange is made up of segments that can be separated).

•Low-priority work should fit in around the high-priority work.

•If you don’t put the chocolate oranges in first, you cannot get them in at all.

•If you start with water in the jar, you will not be able to get anything else in the jar.

•Some items combine and we lose sight of them, such as the sugar and the water, but they still take time.

If we organise our lives around the sweet jar theory, we must plan to complete the large, high-priority items first, and then be selective about the other things that we choose to do. And we must never, never let our lives be filled with other people’s priorities.

WHAT IS MY PERSONAL TIME PROFILE?

There are lots of ways that we can investigate how we use time, but building a personal time profile will indicate your main areas of time use. The first step in this process is to keep an activity log. Next week keep a close track of every activity in every day. You can keep an activity record in any way that works for you, but a common format is shown below. At the end of a week you will have a lot of data about how you spent your time. The next step is to enter the data into a format so that you can see a graphical representation of your time profile. The companion website for this text co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Organising Life and Work
• Chapter 2 How to Study
• Chapter 3 Learning and Skills
• Chapter 4 What are the Key Skills of University Life and the Workplace?
• Chapter 5 Working in Teams
• Chapter 6 Effective Reading Skills
• Chapter 7 Developing Good Writing Skills
• Chapter 8 Presentation Communication
• Chapter 9 Business Calculations
• Chapter 10 Critical Reading and Writing Skills
• Chapter 11 Analysis and Evaluation Skills
• Chapter 12 Examinations and Assignments
• Chapter 13 Thinking and Memory Skills
• Chapter 14 Word Processor Skills
• Chapter 15 Being Effective with Spreadsheets
• Chapter 16 Project Management Skills
• Chapter 17 Social Skills
• Chapter 18 Leadership, Coaching and Mentoring Skills
• Chapter 19 Careers and ‘Futuring’ Skills
• Bibliography
• Index