Personal Strategic Plan Essay

I. Vision Statement: Ten years from now I plan to be in an upwardly mobile business career. II. Value Proposition: I am the hardest working applicant among all other candidates because of my professionalism and motivation. III. SWOT: Strengths: I have been communicating with the public for the last seven years through my job as a bartender. Through this job I have become very comfortable when talking to strangers and making them feel at ease when they talk to me. Weaknesses: Although I communicate well when addressing smaller groups of people I am not as well versed at formal speaking. Most times when giving speeches I tend to start speeding through my topic one because I am nervous and second because I just want to get through it. Opportunities: Technology is changing the process of applying for a job. This trend makes it easier for people to compete for jobs outside of their physical environment, which means more job opportunities. A person living here in the United States can actually work for a business located overseas. Threats: In the same way that technology helps bring more job opportunities it also has its negative affects. It used to be that you would be competing for one job with just a few applicants now with the advancements in technology you are in a way competing with other applicants globally. IV. Goals/ Strategies Goals: I plan to get into an internship program later this summer or next summer. There are many companies that offer internships to college students. There are many benefits when you participate in an internship program. It gives you a look into what exactly happens in the workplace. Along with experience it also gives you your first shot to show a potential employer what skills you can bring to a company. Sometimes if you impress the company you intern for they will offer you a job after you graduate. These things are why participating as an intern is so beneficial. Interning is a great way to get your career started before you even graduate. Strategies: There are many companies that offer internships to USI students. I plan to set up a meeting with Phillip Parker the Director of Career Services and Placement to discuss the different opportunities available. He is always sending business students e-mails about internships that come his way. As of now my busy school and work schedule has not allowed me the necessary free time to participate in an internship. Hopefully he will help me get in touch with the businesses that will be offering internships in the near future. Appendix: One of the major trends that will affect not just me but everyone in some way is technology. When you think about technology you have to think that it is always adapting, and continues to make everything that it ties into more efficient. In the business world it can make things easier from many stand points. Technology is used in communications, marketing, and management. In communication it can help people communicate globally instantaneously. A business person here in the United States can have a video conference call with their partners in China. This makes doing business globally less of a burden. Technology also affects the marketing side of business. There are so many ways to market products through the different venues that technology has created. Facebook is a good example of one of the main social networks that come in to play when you talk about businesses branching out into new marketing campaigns. Using people’s public profiles company can by ad space on Facebook and actually now waste money on advertising outside there demographic. Finally technology has also changed the way businesses can manage and supervise the things that are going on in their business. A business manager in charge of a fast food restaurant can see most of the things that are happening in their business just by logging onto a computer. They can look at the amount of money they are spending in labor and compare that to the amount of the restaurant’s sales. This helps the business world monitor more of the day to day aspects of their business. Although technology is very helpful in the business world it also poses many threats to the business person’s jobs. If you think about the aspects of communication a person could have a job here in the United States and be primarily does his job on a computer for example a web designer. Now let’s say there is a web designer in Japan who can do the same things the designer here in the United States can do but at a fraction of the cost. The employer of the web designer could just start giving work to the designer in Japan. This makes the job market here in the United States global. People are now competing for jobs not only nationally but globally. So this is a definite threat. Technology is also creates a threat when it makes things more efficient. When you think of the restaurant manager from earlier who could look at all of the restaurants he oversees, how long do you thinks his job will be safe. Technology will eventually make it so easy for one person to manage multiple aspects of the business that his job may just become part of another persons’. So technology maybe great for us now, but you also have to worry about technology becoming to efficient and making it hard for the average business person to find or keep their job. Technology can be very helpful to a point, but once it becomes too advanced it then becomes a threat.