Introduction
High Knowledge base characterizes the 21st century. To live and meet the hefty demands of the century, people need to upgrade their skills and knowledge in an attempt to keep at pace with the 21st century dynamic society requirements. A major milestone for aiding people in living up to the demands of the century entangles seeking knowledge amounting to building subtle knowledge about oneself and the manner in which one personally relates with the complex information world. How best one answers the question “who I am” has the capacity to greatly determine an individual’s professional destiny. Understanding Personal competences constitutes one of the ways, which can amicably improve an individual’s capacity to acquire, analyze and synthesize information from the environment, whether work places or the social environment.
“Personal Competence is a set of competencies, which according to the extent to which people demonstrate them determines how well they manage themselves and how personally effective they can be” (Constantinidou, and Baker 298). The building block of Personal competences encompasses self-awareness and aspects of motivation and self-control. Presentational skills, acting in an assertive way, adoption of effective decision making strategies, managing your time effectively and being, not only a team player, but also a team builder also go far way in the inculcation of the personal competence traits in the work environment. These skills also constitute the transferable professional and personal skills, which enable one to work successfully within an organization hence making one more effective within the work place. The paper discusses these skills and further identifies different learning styles with particular concern to the ones viewed most suitable for the writer.
Presentational skills
Presentational skills comprise some of the essential professional and personal skills dearly deserved by people especially the upcoming managers in almost every field, if at all, they have to succeed in their organization management. The skills are also vital for developing self-development competences. McPherson and Begawan note that “presentations and public speaking skills are not limited to certain special people – anyone can give a good presentation, or perform public speaking to a professional and impressive standard” (Para.1). The presentation purposes and formats greatly vary from multimedia, oral, lectures, PowerPoint presentations to long well-panned talks and training and or educational forums talks amongst others. Preparation, experience and confidence play enormous roles in making good presentations.
An individual possessing highly profiled presentations skills talks fearlessly without giving any body “an opportunity to intimidate him or her without his or her permission” (McPherson, and Begawan Para.3). For a presentation to sound eloquent, it demands the purpose to be well formulated and laid down in the fewest possible words. Too much of wording coupled with repetitions may prove lack of proper presentational skills. In addition, the presenter needs to have set out ideas and contents right and have structured properly the subject matter. Prior determination of the target audience characteristics allows the presenter to determine how to accomplish the presentation task as well as the necessary pre-presentation preparations and the necessary practice, which prove crucial for planning the manner of controlling the target environment audience.
Effective decision-making
Decisions aid in the shaping of life, not only that of an individual, but also that of an organization that one manages. As Hammond, Keeney and Raiffa comment, “Making decisions is a fundamental life skill and we can all learn to become much better at it” (95). To be personally competent one must be able to make sound decisions, which translate to an overall good and success of any organization under his or her captainship. A proactive model for making effective decision presents some five components, which one must consider before arriving at a decision: statement of the problem, objectives consideration, taking into consideration all the possible alternatives, consequences and tradeoffs. Embracing these components of effective decision-making helps to one to see “both the tangible and intangible aspects of his/her situation more clearly and to translate all pertinent facts, feelings, opinions, beliefs and advice into the best possible decision” (Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa 167). The circumstances giving rise to the need of problem definition rest on the premise that, behind every decision there must be a problem, which people attempt to solve. Ways in which people define the problems determine the objectives, alternatives available, consequences and the tradeoffs, which people must take into account while making a decision. For instance, if the problem encountered stands out as purely generic, then people must design the decisions likely to solve the problem in a way, which ensures that they establish principles or rules.
Acting assertively
People with personal competence tend to express their opinions, requests, feelings and rights appropriately, directly and honestly without the slightest indication of the intent to cause harm or violate self-esteem and rights of others. These are somewhat some of the concerns that people who purpose to adopt assertiveness traits: which have the capacity of resulting to improved performance in organizational duties execution pursue. Acting assertively entangles a skill, which correlates acutely with personality traits such as self-esteem, self-confidence and life satisfaction. It “makes life easier because you will less frequently allow yourself to get into bad situations, you’ll be less imposed upon by others, you’ll more frequently get what you want and others will treat you differently” (McPherson, and Begawan para.7). It also entails the ability to communicate your thoughts effectively and efficiently. In majority of the situations, those acting passively normally receive unpleasant results always while those acting assertively enjoy the benefits of rewarding results always. One can compare the organizational management scenario analogically with the daily encounters in service stores. Those acting assertively demand what they want requiring others to serve them with it exactly, fast enough leaving the stores premises. On the other hand, those acting passively are left waiting and feeling ignored. Consequently, the passive customers develop a feeling of perceiving themselves as of less personal competency to get what they want first enough without hurting anyone.
Team building and being a team player
Team building skills constitutes one of the vital requirements of an individual who desires to develop effective work teams within an organization. For realization of ardent personal competence and effectiveness in developing team building skills and hence becoming a team player within a particular organization, substantial knowledge of group dynamics stands out as essential. An evolving manager deserves to appreciate that groups evolve in different stages and thus should be fully cognizant of the group characteristics right from the early stages of development. Personal effectiveness in building effective teams entangles setting clear and sound goals, if at all; a team is to receive the results, as well as the derivation of clear objectives for measuring the ongoing team effectiveness strategies. The various ways of ensuring that, a group, which one leads, ends up proving effective such as training, recruiting, replacing or organizing must be time bound. Communication of Procedures followed by group members in making decisions and the ability to come up with monitoring mechanisms constitutes yet another essential personal competence trait in a group leadership. A poorly lead group hardly ends up with satisfying achievements of the organizations goals and objectives.
Effective management of your time
Time stands out as one of the many essential resources that cost hefty sums of money at an organization’s disposal. Organizations normally have limited time to accommodate overwhelmingly competitive projects, which they must complete within specified deadlines. As if setting out procedure to ensure that all the tasks landing on the mangers table daily is not enough chores of the day, co-workers and subordinates flood the manager’s table with questions which obviously comes to compete for the limited time that was meant for successful completion of the set out projects. To ensure that one achieves all the aforementioned tasks, effective time management skills are essential. Such skills allow the manager to achieve more results with minimal stress: something that stands out crucial for improving quality of one’s professional life. Planning and prioritization of the activities of every day encompasses the foundation of effective time management skills. Personal competence in time management imply saying no to all activities perceived as non essential but rather talking ample time to perfectly carryout tasks amounting to quality jobs. Limiting distractions, delegation of duties, break down of mega tasks likely to consume more time, evaluation of the manner in which one spends time, practicing the rule of ten minute and where possible taking a management Corse may enormously help one to manage time more effectively.
Learning styles
To learn, people depend on their senses in acute processing of information derived from the environment. However, people normally tend to deploy one or more senses more than others do. learning styles are “composite of characteristic cognitive, affective, and physiological factors that serve as relatively stable indicators of how a learner perceives, interacts with, and responds to the learning environment” (Constantinidou, and Baker 296). The various learning styles tend to indentify an individual within a certain continuum scales. Even though, the concept of learning styles seems widely acceptable amongst many scholars, disagreement on the most effective ways of measuring and rating the effectives of different styles remains evident. Majority of the researchers believe that people posses different learning styles but “the research tends to agree that it is relative unimportant as it is far more important to match the presentation with the nature of the subject, such as providing correct learning methods, strategies, and context; rather than matching individual preferences” (Coffield Para. 6).
People have found the representation of subject matter in form of tactile and graphics to have conspicuous effects on outcomes of learning regardless of any endeavor to relate them with modalities of the learners. In addition some other studies reveal that use of picture to achieve visual presentation, turns out advantageous for every adult despite low or high preference on any visual learning style. The various learning styles do not give an indication of one’s intelligence and abilities: all they do is to provide information about why some activities tend to be easier to some people and not others. People in addition tends to learn better if a match between the preferred style of learning and the learning strategies adopted get stricken.
Common learning styles include kinesthetic, auditory and visual. Merill argues that majority of the students are normally in a complete state of unawareness of their learning styles that continues if people fail to come up with ways to help them realize their learning styles. These students have high probabilities of learning in other ways (Merrill 43). The knowledge of the learning style of a person has the capacity to facilitate the increment of personal self-awareness especially in respect to perceived personal strengths and weakness. According to Coffield, one can gain “all the advantages claimed for meta-cognition (being aware of one’s own thought and learning processes) by encouraging learners to become knowledgeable about their own learning and that of others” (Para. 10). Today, inventories tests exist, which people can deploy in the determination of the learning styles of an individual. The tests involve answering sixteen questions without having to think too much. Upon running the scoring criteria with the help of some software, the person taking the test receives information of his or her learning style. Many people rely on two or more learning styles.
To me, auditory and visual learning styles prove significant particularly evidenced by experience in academic life. In school, an instructor’s presence in class had a greater ability to foster remembrance of information opposed to reading assigned study materials personally. Recognizing my learning style played a vital role in coming up with coping mechanisms such as ensuring that I never miss classes that prove relevant in compensating for my weaknesses and concentrating on the strengths.
Works Cited
Coffield, Frank. Learning Styles and Pedagogy in Post-16 Learning: A Systematic and Critical Review, 2004. Web.
Constantinidou, Fofi, and Baker, Susan. Stimulus Modality and Verbal Learning Performance in Normal Aging. Brain and Language, 82.3 (2002): 296-311.
Hammond, John, Keeney, Ralph, and Raiffa, Howard. Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions. New York: Crown Business, 2002.
McPherson, Todd and Begawan, Badar. Being Assertive Can Improve Your Life, 2008. Web.
Merrill, David. Instructional Strategies and Learning Styles: Which takes Precedence? Trends and Issues in Instructional Technology, R. Reiser and J. Dempsey. New Jersey, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.