Career Development - The Corporate Environment

The corporate environment is competitive, challenging and demanding. Not withstanding this observation, it is an environment that can teach an individual to learn and personally develop valuable skills that can be transferred to another vocation/job.

I have somewhat little experience in the corporate environment but I’m am close to forefront of the corporate domain. At present, I work in Operations, Planning and Analysis (OP&A) of course on a part-time basis since my studies demand full-time attendance and recognition. Just by the standard name of our division, you can immediately tell that our decisions and activities certainly have a bearing on the overall performance of other business units.

In terms of the hierarchy of our department, I am at the bottom of it. That doesn’t mean that my job isn’t paramount. There’s no doubt it is. I work as an associate in the department, handling and controlling the activities of the operational dialler that concurrently runs when there active operators. We oversee two locations - one in Melbourne and one in Queensland. That’s all I’ll share, for now.

Since the start of my role in this department, I’ve come across a diverse range of individuals, from departmental leaders to other associates from other departments. It’s fun and interesting.

The position sometimes entails an involvement of other business unit team leaders liasing with our personnel. Regular meetings are considered as important for maintaining a strong mutual relationship between certain departments. Team meetings are important in the fact that they provide a forum for team leaders and other people to track performance and to communicate separate objectives from each other. They can be also used to negotiate or standardise objectives in order to resolve certain issues.

In my experience in holding meetings (noting that I haven’t held many meetings), these are naturally some of the many important aspects of holding a meeting:

• Creating a structured and understandable agenda of actionable items - an agenda identifies areas of concern that need to be discussed and ideally, resolved.
• Setting a definitive timeframe for the meeting and preparing the basis for those meetings - let there be no confusion as to how long and when these meetings are to be arranged. Simply put.
• Set aside personal and professional differences - many of the time, meetings involve those who we know and converse with on a regular basis. These can sometimes affect how a meeting will play out.
• Let the meeting act as a consultative forum - meetings are supposed to be a meeting of the ‘minds’, not a one-sided discussion. Everyone should have input during the meeting, and respect is a must.
• Discuss the objectives each participant may have - objectives should be recorded or written down and treated with importance. These objectives are then discussed in subsequent meetings and as to how far they have been accomplished.
• Meetings end with a last round of questioning - during any given meeting, not all questions may have been raised. Allowing any further questions before the dissolution of the meeting is beneficial for all parties.

There’s heaps more, of course. These here are derived from a lot of common sense.

That’s it from me. I can’t think properly now. Byee.