Strategic Guide Project Literature & Language Research Paper

This project is designed to give you experience interacting with professionals, delving into their leadership experience, and helps reinforce the importance of these skills in real-world contexts. The idea behind this project is to get you talking with 3 real-world professionals about their workplace experiences. These will be simple interviews that you will document in detail. You will then code your data through a process we refer to as a content analysis. Through this process, you will develop a system for describing the types of answers your participants provided.

MGG 303 – Strategic Guide Project

Instructions

This project is designed to give you experience interacting with professionals, delving into their leadership experience, and helps reinforce the importance of these skills in real-world contexts. 

The idea behind this project is to get you talking with 3 real-world professionals about their workplace experiences. These will be simple interviews that you will document in detail. You will then code your data through a process we refer to as a content analysis. Through this process, you will develop a system for describing the types of answers your participants provided.

This project has several different parts, with different due dates. They are as follows:

• Professional Interviews: You will identify and interview three professionals who work in careers that stem from the degree you currently pursue regarding their experiences in their respective careers. This assignment is designed to have you explore avenues you might pursue with your degree, as well as get advice from seasoned professionals about how you might prepare for such a career. These professionals may be from the same or different career paths (e.g., advertising, marketing, public relations, management, human relations, corporate sales, organizational consulting, entrepreneurship, etc.). After identifying careers of special interest to you, you will then identify and approach individuals currently employed in those fields, asking if they would be willing to speak with you about their experiences and career. A list of resources is listed in Step 2 below.

A good resource to check to find professionals willing to work with students is Career Connections a website within UB. Everyone you find here has willingly signed up and is alumnae of UB.

• Conducting Interviews: Importantly, you will be trained on how to conduct such an interview, taking care how to think critically about the information provided, determine when more should be pulled from the subject, using guiding questions where necessary, and helping the interviewee to reword and articulate their ideas, if needed. You will take notes, distill key ideas and quote key narratives if necessary.  

• Secondary Analysis: You will conduct research identifying and examining the skill sets companies in your field of interest look for in their hiring candidates. You can explore business journals, websites of particular companies, bios of their directors or vice-presidents, or even examining the job postings. These skills should be outside of what you have learned from your interviews.  

• Final Report - Strategic Guide: Lastly, you will summarize in a series of key findings what you learned from your primary data collection (interviews). You will summarize the key take away points from the interviews and secondary analysis.

• Submission: You will then submit your final report with the results of your initial interviews and secondary analysis to UBLearns.

STEPS TO COMPLETION

Step 1: Identify career paths of special interest to you. This can be done through the Career Center, speaking with your professors, your personal network, and the like.

Step 2: After you have identified fields of interest, you then must identify professionals who work in these fields. This can be done via professional contacts (e.g., through your department), through your personal network (e.g., friend of the family or a relative who works in an area of interest to you), UB Career Connector Network a database of UB alumni willing to connect with undergrad students (http://www.buffalo.edu/alumni/career-resources/career-connector.html), or personal outreach (i.e., you identify organizations that house such individuals and you reach out to them, including cold-calling).  Be nice and ask politely. Most people and even companies will say yes. Please introduce yourself and explain the purpose of the email. We will practice this in class.

Step 3: Set up an opportunity to speak with each individual in real-time. Due to COVID I expect that most of your interviews will be done via virtual connection or phone. I have provided the list of questions below (See Appendix A). You will need to develop two additional questions that you will ask. Do not be afraid to ask clarifying (probing) questions while interviewing.

Step 4: When people are providing answers to your questions, your job is to write out their answers in as detailed account as possible. You may even wish to record your conversation and listen to it later to ensure that you’re getting every bit of the conversation correct. Be sure that you are taking notes and telling the stories EXACTLY as the person says it. You’ll be left with a rough script of their responses (this will become a transcript), which you will later include in the appendix of your paper. An example interview is provided in (See Appendix B).

Step 5:  Next, I want you to think about what you learned from your interviews. You will examine the interviews that underscore skills, experiences, and knowledge these employers think you should acquire before entering their field. You will then create a report and list of key findings (See Appendix C for formatting of your report). These present the thematic and core takeaway messages from your two data sets.

Step 6: You will create a "Strategic Guide" for how to undertake your program to hit the job market in the best possible shape. We will discuss specifics for formatting below.  

Appendix A 

Information to be included in Transcript (i.e., put this at the top of the page):

1. Person’s name


2. Occupation


3. College Attended


4. Major

Questions:

1. What core skill sets, knowledge, or experiences do you feel will best prepare a current college student interested in pursuing work in your field?

1. If you were in a position to design a college program from the ground up specifically to prepare students to enter your field, what would you ensure was included (specific training, course content, experiences, etc.)?

1. Are there specific experiences, training, content you wish you received in college that you think could have helped further your career?

1. What problems, frustrations, or concerns do you see with recent college graduates entering your field these days?

1. Are there any other issues or suggestions you might have for someone interested in this career path?

Remember to add 2 questions of your own.

Appendix B

(Label this section Appendix A in your guide)

{STUDENT NAME HERE}

Interview with Bruce Rozengaard

Position: Quality Control Manager at FOX News

Contacts: email – [email protected]; cell – (716) 555-1805

College: UB

Major: Communication

1. 1.     What core skill sets, knowledge, or experiences do you feel will best prepare a current college student interested in pursuing work in your field?

• First and foremost, the ability to write to pictures in true TV style. Many times we came across new recruits who delved into a topic without considering what visual material was available, and they used long, complex sentences in their writings. That may be fine with the print media but certainly not with TV.


• Secondly, a good grasp of hot issues in different parts of the world will definitely be a big plus for those aspiring to excel in the industry. Globalization has made the world a smaller place and the world economy more integrated. What appears to be a local news story could often have a global perspective. One example of that is last month’s disastrous building collapse in Bangladesh and the link to international brand name garment retailers.


• Thirdly, keeping up with technological advances is also necessary, especially in mobile networking. For reasons, it is becoming cost increasingly frequent for news crews working at a distant location to use the Internet to send their works back to the station.


• Fourth, they need good interpersonal skills.
  
  
  
  • PROBE: What do you mean when you say interpersonal skills? What exactly are you referencing?
  
  
  • They need to be able to talk to people. To carry a conversation. To be polite. To lead a work team. Handle conflict.
  
  
  
  

1. 2.     Are there specific experiences, training, content you wish you received in college that you think could have helped further your career?

• I didn’t do an internship in college, which was a mistake. If I were to do it over again, I’d definitely do that. I didn’t study abroad, either, which would have been a good thing for me. It would have helped me mature a bit more, see the world. It’s one of my regrets about college.  

1. 3.     What problems, frustrations, or concerns do you see with recent college graduates entering your field these days?

• They should be better read. Read continually, soaking up as much information and making as much connections as possible. They aren’t doing that enough.


• A lot of current affair issues to keep up with. They need to be updated.
  
  
  
  • PROBE: What do you mean by be better read?
  
  
  • They need to keep up with current events, not just their Facebook friends.
  
  
  • PROBE: What do you mean about making as much connections as possible?
  
  
  • I mean understanding the world around them, how it’s all connected. How does something in India affect something in Russia, which then affects us in the US.
  
  
  
  

1. 4.     If you were in a position to design a college program from the ground up specifically to prepare students to enter your field, what would you ensure was included (specific training, course content, experiences, etc.)?

• College graduates in America are often comparatively weak in terms of their general knowledge about the world and their understanding of Asia in particular. But Asia, especially China, is a rising power on the world stage.


• A recent Reuters report cited U.S. intelligence analysts as saying that by 2030, Asia is likely to overtake North America and Europe combined in global power based on GDP, military spending and technological investment. And China, now the world’s second largest economy, will probably surpass the United States a few years before 2030.


• Aspiring journalists in America need to have a deeper understanding of what is going on in Asia.


• The inclusion of courses about contemporary China and Asia and world economics in the core program plus student exchange schemes with Asian universities may help serve this purpose.

1. 5.     What role do effective writing skills play in this field?

• They are essential. If you can’t write well, you won’t be allowed to interact with clients or the public. People judge your intelligence by your writing. Poor writing means you won’t likely advance up the corporate ladder, if you even get hired in the first place.  

Appendix C 

FORMAT of your REPORT (2 sections, Reference List, and Appendix)

Times New Roman

12-point font

Double space

1-inch margins

Section 1: Summary of thoughts (at the least 2 pages)

Tell me how you plan to implement the information you learned through your professional interviews and secondary analysis during the rest of your time here at UB. Also, explain what you found to be important to focus on and why. Finally, reflect on explain what this assignment meant for you. Specifically, how you felt starting the assignment and how different did you feel at the end of the assignment.

Section 2: Key Takeaways (at least 10 takeaways)

Here you will write the points that you found to be important (this list will encompass what you learned through the interviews and secondary analysis). List them with bullets and write a short definition of what that skill/concept means in your own words.

Example

• Communication – Write your definition based on what you’ve learned from the interview.

Reference List (APA Format)

Appendix A - Transcripts