Career Advancement Portofolio (CAP)

Career Objectives and Plans

I began and completed my goal of earning an MBA so that I could further my current career as a financial analyst and also enhance my future possibilities within the world of business and education. As a woman, I knew it was very important to find a career path that would allow me to work and raise a future family. Thus, I concluded that receiving an MBA would not only help further my current career in finance, but would also possibly open the door to being able to teach at a junior college, which could offer a flexible schedule to accommodate raising children. I am sure I will have to begin by teaching night classes, but hope I will soon be able to work up to the opportunity to teach daytime classes also. With my continued work experience, in combination with earning an MBA, I feel I would be highly qualified to follow one of my life long dreams, that of teaching. Throughout my schooling, my life has been influenced and shaped by great teachers, and some day I also would like the opportunity to give back to another generation of young people as they prepare themselves to enter the business world.

Throughout my career and the upcoming years, I would also like to continue to develop and improve some of the career strengths I feel I have. These strengths include: I am ambitious, I have strong communication skills, and I have the ability to think things through and come up with solutions. Of course, I will also heavily concentrate on my weaknesses to help them become strengths. I will continue to look for employment and opportunities that are exciting and challenging, help me have self-respect and respect from others, and give me a sense of accomplishment.

Capabilities Developed During the MBA Program

Skills The main skill I developed from my MBA experience is the ability to prepare and write essays, summaries and research reports. This was a weakness of mine, and I am thankful for the opportunity I had to develop it and to receive feedback from my professors on how to improve this skill. Throughout the program, papers became much easier for me to write, a sign to me that I was gaining a skill. The program also taught me how to interact and present new ideas to large groups of people. I believe that to be successful in a business career, one must have excellent written and oral communication skills. The MBA program emphasized this by making sure that each course taught strongly incorporated one or both of these skills within its curriculum.

Attempting to work full-time, go to graduate school and maintain a home also taught me to effectively organize my time and to assess my priorities. Gaining the skills to manage my time and organize my priorities was the only way to survive the last two years. This skill is also very necessary to achieve success in one's career as a good job requires the ability to multi-task and work on several projects at one time.

Attitudes My experiences have helped me gain an appreciation for the possibility of increases in productivity that can come from working in teams. Working in teams for school projects is not what I think most people really look forward to, but I have seen many advantages and how they can help me in my career. For example, through team projects I was able to glean much information from my team members and I was able to share the knowledge that I had too. This allowed me to practice "teaching" as that is what I want to do with my degree. I was also able to work with several different personality types and learn how to adapt to and work with each one. This attitude is crucial to my success in the workforce because I have been and will continue to be required to work closely with others, and often times with others that I do not get along with.

My MBA program also helped me develop my values of advanced education and hard work. I see now what further educated employees can bring to a company. We may not remember every single formula and vocabulary work we learned, but the basic foundation of written and oral skills, adaptation, and hard work are laid. The ability to solve problems and find creative solutions is also gained by this further education.

Traits Our ethics class taught me that I must watch my intentions closely at all times. Immanuel Kant makes a wonderful point in that we must not make other humans a means to our ends. I find sometimes that acting this way is a natural human tendency, but in order to act morally it must be contained. I have always believed in the golden rule and in treating others as an end and not a means, but sometimes I fear reason slips from me and I look to someone to see only what they can do for me. I learned that I must worry about acting in a way in which I believe is moral, a way in which I would want to be treated.

Motives I have a sincere desire to succeed and accomplish my goals. Completing this MBA was a huge step for me and an enormous goal to complete. In the past I thought this degree would tie up a lot of things for me, but instead I have come to realize that it has opened up several doors and afforded the opportunity to set and accomplish more goals and to strive for achievement in many different areas. I am very nervous about the thought of trying to find a teaching job and to present myself in such a way that a junior college would want to hire me. This MBA may have given me the education I needed for an adjunct position, but I have come to realize that I have a lot further still to go. There are several more attributes I need to learn and more mentors I need to find and emulate. I want to be a teacher, but more importantly, I want to be a great teacher. This means I must constantly be aware of my surroundings and those other great teachers around me. I must be humble and eager to learn new skills, motives, attitudes and traits at all times. And finally, I must seek for continued knowledge.

Future Personal Development Plans

Now that I will soon be receiving my MBA, I feel it is expected that I have enhanced communication and interpersonal skills, both written and oral. I also need to have the ability to make quick and insightful decisions and to solve complex problems. An MBA graduate must also have the desire to lead and change an organization for the better, and as I always hope for myself, ethical standards must also be a number one priority. Setting future PDP goals will help me in my desire to develop a meaningful and fulfilling career. Goals are what help us always stretch and reach to become more. My MBA has laid a great foundation for my future, but I still have a lot of work to do.

My first PDP goal was to improve my accounting skills at my current job. About four months after I made that goal I was promoted into the finance department, and therefore adjusted my goal to instead improve my finance and budgeting/forecasting skills. I still do some accounting work for the marketing department, but my boss and I have talked about moving away from that and letting me work full-time on only finance issues. Thus, my first future PDP goal is to make a plan with my boss on how we can most effectively give my accounting responsibilities back to the accounting department, therefore allowing me additional time to learn more finance skills. Among many things, I would like to become involved in the creation of the financial dashboard that is presented to our CFO weekly. As my skills increase in preparing these dashboards, I would like to improve upon my second PDP goal, which was to take more leadership within teams. These dashboards are a team/department effort, and if I prove myself competent enough, I would like to head them up each week. I will also look for different ways to take leadership roles in my department, as well as ask my boss what he would like to see.

While I am working on the above mentioned goals at my current job, I also plan to start teaching night classes at a junior college so that I might work my way into teaching during the day. Thus, I know I need to set PDP goals to enhance and develop my teaching skills. My brother-in-law was my mentor for this program, and I plan to start attending some of his night classes to watch how he teaches and to see what I could emulate. I would also like to ask some of the youth in my church organization what attributes they find most effective in their teachers at school. I'm sure they would have a lot to say and that I could learn from them what skills work best to create a good environment for learning. In addition to this, I will begin to make a list of the attributes that I found most effective in my professors during my undergraduate and graduate programs. I will review the syllabuses given and what we did in each class to help me remember and write down what I think would help me and my students in my future career of teaching.