Career Development

This reflection journal is based on the guest presentation at the Fraser Coast campus.

The presentation was given by Michele Krome, a chartered accountant at Avance, a local chartered accounting firm and Kyle Leaver, Sales and Marketing coordinator in the same firm with Michele. The presentation generally present the meant of employability skills and ways to develop these skills during studies in the university.

The employability skills mainly include two parts. One is hard skills which is technical or discipline specific skills. To get these skills, undergraduate students need to:

Study hard and achieve the best academic record;

Get more practical experience;

Identify own career goals;

Choose electives smartly.

Another one is generic or soft skills which are beyond hard skills. They were described in 8 aspects:

Communication;

Teamwork;

Problem solving;

Initiative and enterprise;

Planning and organizing;

Self management;

Learning;

Technology.

Both hard and soft skills are important to university students for getting a job in the graduate employment market, furthermore, stay in a job and achieve own successful; contribute to the organization that working for.

From the presentation, I learned that. Hard skills are what I can get from my classes and books related to my course that I am learning. It enables me to do the basic requirement in the future job. But it is not enough to do the job very well, more skills like soft skills should be useful. This kind of skills are more like my personal abilities, they can turns me all-sided, also solve more difficult problems in the daily work. Graduates who will be able to contribute more than just technical skills are more preferred by the employers.

Attend classes can helps me to get more written knowledge, also it is good to get a part-time job or volunteer work to get more practical experience therefore my hard skills are improved, because it helps to know what the real working world is. There are many ways to get soft skills because there are many aspects of soft skills, each aspect have some detail skills that I should have, to achieve the various skills, I should take part in a variety of activities within the community and search more serviceable information on the internet.

After watching the presentation, I strongly feel that as a university student, there are many skills that I do not have right now, I must study hard and do my best to get these skills