consulting homework about self assessment

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Self Assessment – Consulting skills

Introduction

Self-evaluation is a great tool to evaluate your work and learning progress. It helps to stay involved, motivated and encourages self-reflection and responsibility for learning(Stanford Teaching Commons, n.d.). In this way, one would be more focused on the job that he is doing. Self-assessments are not only important to growth in a professional or academic career, but it also helps to develop one's personality. Self-assessment is a good opportunity to monitor own abilities and find out the strengths, weakness and self-diagnose relevant solutions. It can be a difficult task for a person to assessing own skills and abilities, but it can be an effective way to move forward by improving and sharpen the skills. By critiquing own work and behavior, an individual can gain insight that helps to improve him.

I have learned many new things from the class environment and always try to acquire as much knowledge as I can. Sometimes class discussion goes beyond my knowledge as I have no experience in this field therefore, in such a situation, I got a chance to recognize my deficiencies as a consultant.

In this paper, I will discuss the self-assessment of my consulting skills. I identified some of my good qualities that meet requirementsof a consultant and on the other hand there are some low points in my personality as a consultant. This paper helps me to think deeply about my consulting skills and is a good source to find out the ways where I am lacking. I tried to find some ways with which I can improve my weakness which I will discuss further in this paper.

Strengths

As a consultant, I find out that there are mainly four qualities where I found myself strong.

· Ability to share knowledge, teach and train people: Sharing knowledge and guiding people is always considered as a positive thing in an individual's personality. I am glad to have this in me as it is one of the core qualities of a consultant. Although I don't have practical work experience of this quality, I tried to compare it with my academic life. Through my MBA program, I got to chance to meet many people from different regions who have a different kind of knowledge. When a student is new at the university, they should know many new things, for example, APA and most of the student did not aware of this before coming to university. In the last semester, I saw many new students on the campus, and they all are looking around with a bunch of questions. There is one student who comes to me and asking about the criteria of courses and I explained her lot of things and APA is one of them. She is in touch with me to date and I tried to answer all her queries as much as I can.

· Ability to gain trust and respect: This is a demand of every career as it helps individuals to perform any job with honesty and integrity. This quality is a bit connected with the first one as I genuinely helped any person and try to provide all the information that I have. After helping a person, I noticed that I gained their respect and they have trust in my advice. I have a recent example for this, one of the classmates from my accounting class wants to register for the next semester and she asked me about the course and instructors. I gave her my opinions about the courses and instructors and tell her to discuss with her other class fellows, but she told me that she has trust in me, and I always give her the right suggestions. We both met just three months ago, and I am happy and at the same time feeling proud as well to gain such kind of trust and respect from my classmates.

· Ability to admit mistakes and learn from failure: This quality is preferred by those people who want to learn something by performing any task rather than just waiting for the right solution form someone else. I always admit my mistakes when I made in any assignment or any group work. I tried to fix it by myself by taking some suggestions or discussing it with any of my peers or with an experienced person if needed.

· Ability to understand people and work with them: When I am working in any group project I always tried to cooperate with my colleagues and understand their situation. I always listen to their ideas and consider their views in the discussion. I always try to think from the other person's perspective toget a better understanding of their situation. In my group projects, I consider the situations and different schedules of each person and tried to make the arrangements for meeting accordingly. Apart from this, we divide the parts of projects while considering the individual's knowledge.

Weakness

I identified three weak points in my personality that can be obstacles in my way to be a good consultant.

· Faculty in written communication: I have always a kind of fear from writing big reports because I have my background education in the science field where long answers are always avoided by instructors and they trained us to give short and to the point answers. Apart from this our grammar is also not much considered while grading. All these things became my habit during my graduation, but now I am avoiding short answers and tried to give a clear picture of my idea to the reader. To some extent, I improved as I have to write numerous reports in my MBA program.

· Ability to learn quickly and easily: I often lacking in this area especially in my consulting class. It gives me sometimes hard time to grab so many things during the class because everything is new for me. I have a habit to think about any from different perspectives that sometimes confuses me about the actual concepts. For this sometimes I ask questions to the professor during the class and sometimes after the class. I am thankful to the professor who clarifies my all doubts without any frustration. I am trying to improve it by controlling my thinking to just the actual concept to avoid any confusion and itis helping me so far.

· Flexibility and adaptability to changed conditions: Changing conditions and change management is taking big attention in the business world. Due to the rapid change in technology and advancements change can see often at each workplace and in the ways of performing the work. Therefore, it is becoming crucial to have a flexible mindset that can adapt any changes. I am good with the minor changes but for big changes I always want to avoid those anyhow. For instance, at my workplace there mainly two stores under my manger and normally he gave me more shifts at one location, so I am used to working at that location only. If he gave me a shift at another location,although everything is similar at both locations, I always confused about a lot of things at another location. Therefore, I always prefer to work at my usual location. I tried to learn and accept the changing conditions by changing my attitude towards different situations.

· Ability to withstand pressure and live with frustration and uncertainties: Different people have different personalities so does their abilities to perform work under different situations. I heard that some people perform very well under pressure, but I am the opposite if I have some pressure, then rather putting my all efforts into work I just want to finish that work as soon as possible. It becomes quite harder for me to do the work efficiently and effectively. Furthermore, same as the changing conditions I am a bit bad on handling uncertainties. I want to improve these things so that I can overcome the hurdles of consulting career. Analyzing real-life examples related to this may help me to work on this as it will give me an idea of how they are dealing with the situations.

Change in Views

Before attending the class, I wasn't enough aware of consulting management. I had just a basic view about this, but now my knowledge about the consulting is increased and has a good understanding of the key concepts of consulting. Although if I want to start my career in this field, I need a lot of practical and theoretical knowledge to get a deep dive into this area, I can get a good start with my current knowledge. Moreover, working on weak points and stabilize the strong ones would help me to be perfectly suitable for this profession.

I found that consulting is a field where you need learning, but your perfection comes out when you are working in real situations. The learning process helps to compare the situation with historical data which helped to find the solutions. Different kind of situations and case studies helps to imagine the situation in a different way and push us to come up with unique solutions.

Conclusion

After assessing my skills I come to know that although I am good in some areas that are listed under the qualities of a good consultant, still I need to work on my low points and try to have some new skills that can enhance my personality as a consultant. Learning is a continuous process and a person should move with it for the successful race of his career. To pursue a career in the consulting field, honestly, I need a lot more effort than my current ones. It is a vast area and I should have to double my efforts to enter the consulting world.

References

Stanford Teaching Commons. (n.d.). Student Self-Assessment. Retrieved from

https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/resources/teaching/evaluating-students/assessing-student-learning/student-self-assessment