Reflective Report

In this first part of the report, I am going to describe what kind of soft skills I have already, the way I got them, analyse what soft skills are needed to be looked and improved in the near future. (during the Business Skills course)

To begin with, I want to introduce myself. I am currently in my third year at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics and I am concentrating in national and regional economy, finance, accounting and macroeconomic planning and forecasting and now I am doing my exchange programme called International Business Experience at Hogeschool Rotterdam.

During my past years at University, I have acquired a number of important soft skills. First of all, from my first year to the end of the second year I was the head of my studying group and was responsible for the group of 25 people, I had to organise meetings with them, informed about latest news. Doing this work helped me in gaining basic of business communicative skills because I had to deal with 25 different people in different situation. In addition, my specialisation at university is macroeconomic planning and forecasting and studying this programme helped me be good with numbers and I’m able to work on with a lot of numerical information, understand and analyse it in an appropriate level.

Last fall I took part in Global Management Challenge 2012-2013 and in Banks Battle 2012 on a top manager position, these are one of the largest Strategy and Management Competitions based on business simulations. That experience has supplied me with many soft skills. For instance, I was the captain of the team of 4 people and this position boosted my self – confidence. Moreover, every week we had meetings where we discussed strategy and made decisions, so I at first acquired and then improved my skills in planning and organization the working process properly. Furthermore, being a leader made my character stronger and taught how to be a quick-thinker because for a several period of time my team and I had to deal with difficult situations and worked under pressure but still met deadlines. It is also necessary to add that I got very useful experience in working as a team-member so I improved this one of the most important soft skills.

My future plans are working on skills which I already have and acquire new, try to find the most effective way how to learn and improve them. To begin with, focusing on skills which I want to learn are: • literacy because • analysis and decision-making
For this moment these are my main weak points but I am ready to improve the situation. Also I want to continue my work on other soft skills and practice them to get a necessary knowledge and experience. In addition to this, I strongly believe that doing the IBEX programme will help me to achieve this goal because it covers a lot of useful subjects which provide it. For example, group work during the lectures, project work with GREEFA company, guest lectures and personal experience of our teachers, all these things will help me as a student improve my performance.

This reflective report tried to review and understand these skills and experience I already have during my academic studies at my home-university. It reflected what was delivered in classes and what I achieved by myself, which and how soft skills were developed and how to increase my employability, overcoming my weaknesses and working on my strengths.

This year is the third of my undergraduate degree; I plan to success in my future years and to not loose motivation, always keeping my plans and goals in mind. These years at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics gave me a good base, but what was learned need to be developed in order to graduate with honors