Sample IND301A Industry Consulting Project Assignment

IND301A Industry Consulting Project Assignment Sample

Career planning is an ongoing exercise and in a rapidly changing environment, it requires frequent adjustments. Digitalisation, robotics and automation, globalisation and even the recent pandemic have impacted the way we work and how our organisations or industries operate. The days where we could pick a dream career, enrol into a course that would get us where we wanted are gone. The new working life of many employees will include a portfolio of various jobs in quite a few careers, meaning you will be going through a recruitment process several times in your professional life and lifelong learning will play an important role in that process.

In this subject, you are working as a consultant to our live brief client (your practicum). The aim of this assessment is for you to be your own consultant. You would need to identify your current capabilities as well as future skills, competencies and behaviors that will be required of you in a role you would like to apply for in the future. You will then assess the gap in competencies and formulate a plan that will realistically enable you to get to your next/dream job. In your plan, you will account for various factors that may impact your successful transition.

You are required to:

- Find online or create yourself a job description of a role you would like to apply for in the future. It can be a role that exists within your current organisation or a completely new role, the role you see yourself in. Ensure the job description includes hard and soft/smart skills required. A copy of the job description should be attached in the appendix.

- Assess your current capabilities and your current role. Please attach a copy of your current role in the appendix. If you are not currently employed, please provide an evaluation of your skills and attributes you believe you possess as a student. Remember to include a copy in the appendix.

- Identify the gap between the current role and your desired role.

- Create a professional development plan

- Identify factors (promotors and barriers) influencing your successful job transition. Provide a mitigation plan.

- Include all your planned actions and milestones in a Gantt chart or similar (i.e. what concrete tasks you will undertake to close the gaps and in what timeframes that these tasks be undertaken to achieve your goal of securing your selected job)

- Include justification of how your plan, when completed will enhance your employability in the future.

- Your introduction should include a clear statement of the purpose of the paper and how it proceeds (i.e. provide the structure of the paper).

- Use headings and subheadings to address different assessment requirements. You are encouraged to use infographics in your report

Solution

Introduction

The paper will share its concern for career planning in the context of hotel management in a reputed multinational hotel. In order to conduct an organized structure throughout the project, the paper will first offer the job description with all details to cultivate present capabilities for the present role through SWOT analysis for assignment help to understand strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the characteristic to better analyze the gap between the desired role and the present scenario. Accordingly, the personal development plan will be justified by a self-directed learning cycle where promotion and barrier factors to mitigate weaknesses and threats. Proper milestones would be justified by the Gnatt chart and justification would finally be conducted to confirm that the career planning is successful to justify its role and objectives.

Discussion

Job description

The person would be responsible to play the function of strategic business leader with enough responsibility for engineering or maintenance, culinary expertise, food and beverage, housekeeping, front office, etc. The position will directly report to the department head to implement and develop departmental strategies to ensure initiated brand image. It is important to meet the standards, target customer needs, and employee satisfaction as per the brand standards to have a clear focus for maximized financial performance and growing revenue with the developed positive relationship in the culture.

Core work activities

- Demonstrating and communicating with key drivers to confirm great satisfaction
- Analysis of service issues and identification of trends.
- Making and executing necessary decisions for the betterment
- Perfect collaboration with the hotel management team
- Monitoring hotel operations
- Sales performance as per budget
- Reviewing financial statements and reports to determine hotel operation performance as per budget
- Supports and coaches operation team for better management
- Developing a system for enabling the customer to accommodate guest satisfaction
- Reviews guest feedback to align it with the leadership team
- Implementation of more and more creative solutions to overcome the obstacle to improve guest satisfaction
- Fair treatment to the employees with equitability justified employee feedback system

Education and experience: 2 years degree certificate from an accredited university in restaurant management, hotel management, business administration, or the same. Four years experience in management operation sales and marketing, housekeeping, front desk service, or related.

Present capabilities in the present role through SWOT

Strengths - My self-evaluation confirms that I have enough potential to be a successful professional in the management field. As per my evaluation and offered feedback by my friends and teachers I found that my communication skill is quite effective to impress and motivate anyone and everyone. I personally think that communication skill is the most important skill for any field specifically for the hotel industry. Due to effective communication skills, my interpersonal skill is even satisfactory which helps me to create a positive and productive environment surrounding me to make everyone happy. I can even better handle stress factors in situational crises with understanding and patience showing all my integrity. Such type of personal characteristics helps me to better accommodate or co-operate with different types of people where effective communication is another plus point.

Weaknesses - However I found that sometimes I lack in keeping my eye for details as I am not so detail-oriented. For management positions being detail oriented is very important. Hence, it can be a great weakness for my employability. As I do not have much experience in the professional field thereby I think I do not possess enough operational knowledge.

Opportunities - Though I have some drawbacks in my personal characteristics to possess the role of hotel manager; still I think my communication and interpersonal skills can offer me enough opportunity to attract better leadership quality and team building skills which I think can be a great opportunity for me in the field of hotel management.

Threats - Due to lacking knowledge of operational management, financial management can be a big threat to being successful in the role of the hotel manager. It would even restrict my flexibility in that particular role to be successful.

Gap analysis between current and desired through grow

Gap analysis can best help to understand the current scenario or present characteristics of my role and the gap which I need to cover to be potential enough for my desired role. Gap analysis can best be done through GROW model as it can help to address each significant aspect of gap analysis. The GROW model has four distinct sections - goal, reality, options, and will. As per my present characteristics with all its strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat the most important thing or goal for me is to acquire enough operational knowledge (Aring, 2022). The operational knowledge can help me to better handle daily responsibilities with better financial management to confirm flexibility in my role. In the real scenario, I do not have enough operational knowledge which further maximizes the difficulty for me to get a hold over financial management having flexibility. In order to address such weaknesses or threats in my characteristics I can opt for generating more awareness to have operational knowledge (Yount et al. 2018). I personally think that operational knowledge can best be acquired by joining in work culture. Thereby I will definitely go for a part-time job to have enough knowledge about the operational process in the hotel. Furthermore, by that time I will even generate theoretical knowledge to align the theoretical knowledge with my practical experience to be more effective as an option. To confirm my willingness for this particular desired position, I will thereby try to follow some of the most successful hotel managers to understand their positive and negative to better address the role and responsibilities (Stoner, 2020).

PDP through the self-directed learning cycle

Understanding the gap in my characteristics for the desired position and having my options to take care of it is time to plan for a personal development plan. A self-directed learning cycle can better help me to articulate the personal development plan in a better way. The self-directed lining cycle has five distinct features to address (Gabreviciene, Petrosiene, & sidlauskiene, 2019). The features are connected with each other to complete the circle of learning. For me, the established learning goals are to have enough practical knowledge about the operational process of a hotel as well as better theoretical knowledge regarding the same. To address the second cycle I have already evaluated my strengths and weakness through which I found that following professional journals, and reading blogs written by successful hotel managers can be really effective resources to be taken care of. Direct communication with some successful professionals from the same field even would be helpful to be more enriched by the help of human resources. In order to plan my activity for removing the weakness and threats I will try to divide my learning goals through SMART.

As I have already planned for joining a part-time job thereby I will try to monitor my performance through the practical scenario to understand if I successfully aligned the practical experience with my political knowledge and improving myself with the passing days (Gorbatov, Khapova, Oostrom, & Lysova, 2021). Finally, as per the performance evaluation and my reflection, I will further try to design my learning strategy. If I would have satisfactory results through the referred strategy then I will focus more on these strategies and if I would not get satisfactory results through the same then I will try to acquire learning from my practical experience through my seniors by their offered suggestions and guidelines to follow.

Promotion and barrier factors

My effective communication and adequate interpersonal skill would be the triggering or promotional factors to make me more effective for the desired job role. Effective communication and interpersonal skill can help me to have better co-operation and collaboration with my seniors and colleagues which eventually help me to accommodate self-learning in an accelerated manner (Johnston, 2021). As I have often failed to offer concentrated undivided attention to the activity hence which can be a great barrier to my learning process. Inattentive nature can make the scenario complex and crucial as well as it would even make it difficult for me to trigger my learning process. Time management can be another barrier to my learning as I need to perfectly align all my otherwise activities to the work schedule.

Mitigation plan

Thereby, it is very important for me to be detail-oriented as much as possible to be a potential candidate for my desired job. In order to do so I will try to engage myself only in those activities which directly or indirectly are associated with the job role to be more focused on the same. By exercising my strengths like communication and interpersonal skill, I will try to make the organizational culture always positive and productive which eventually help me to be more connected leading to detail-oriented (Lupsa-Tataru Dana Adriana. 2019). I will try to put all my focus on giving the task to confirm concentration. I would even avoid multitasking as that help me to not to share my concentration in several factors and make me detail-oriented.

GNATT Chart

Conclusion

The career planning for the job role of a hotel manager is done in an organized manner to address each significant aspect. A proper, detailed description of the job role clearly conveys the required skills and responsibilities. A SWOT analysis further evaluates my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in me to better identify the gap. Grow model helps to have proper goals in a real context to decide several options and willingness for that particular job role. The self-directed learning cycle through its distinct phases has assured the main goals and objectives through PDP to directly convey the main strategies where the Gantt chart finally justifies the time frame for the entire development. Such an organized structure of career planning definitely can help me to acquire all the required skills in me to be a successful or potential hotel manager accomplishing desired job roles and enhancing employability.

References