An obvious goal as a working adult returning to school is, of course, to earn a degree. My overall goal is no different than any other student, however, I also have several personal goals I hope to achieve while attending the University of Phoenix.
Some of these goals are to acquire new skills and enhance my current business abilities, to apply what I learn in the classroom to forward my career, and to feel personal satisfaction of finishing something I started. Already having experience in the business world has proven to me that it is essential to have skills to maintain and improve daily functions. Three skills I’d personally like to improve on are my organizational, time management, and presentation skills. At my place of employment for the past five years, I’ve noticed that as I gain more and more responsibilities, it becomes harder to remember appointments or find items on my desk. The need to become more organized is quickly becoming a necessity. If I were more organized, I’d spend less time searching for things and would have more time to dedicate to my new responsibilities.
This, in effect, will help improve my time management skills at work which will hopefully rub off on my habits in my personal life. If improvement was made on my organizational and time management skills, I’d hope that I’d feel more prepared and therefore, more comfortable to make presentations in both the classroom and the workplace. In order to further my career with my current employer, I would need to apply these skills in my position. I’ve seen first hand that being complacent will not take you far and that only learning what you “need to” will rapidly expose the ceiling of how far up the ladder you can go. By just going through the motions of coming to work everyday, only getting done what has to be done, and going home at the end of the day, one might realize that an everyday routine can quickly turn into a mundane professional life.
At the same time, if a person does all of these things, but shows a bit of initiative to gain more knowledge of the job, they may see an opportunity to slightly move up in the company. The latter is my situation. My experience and knowledge of my department and its systems have afforded me the opportunity to move up within the department over the past five years, but I’m beginning to see a limit of how far those skills alone will allow me to climb. Being an expert in my field of pharmaceutical benefits doesn’t translate into managing personnel just as knowing how to complete a task doesn’t mean I’m able to give a clear presentation on how it should be done. Sure, I’ve been rewarded for the work I’ve done and knowledge I’ve obtained, but at some point, my employer will eventually see that more is needed to continue to promote me to higher, more management focused positions. My goal is to complete these courses and obtain my degree to prove that, if the situation arises, I can be the right person for the job.
A more personal goal of mine is to finish what I’ve started. After high school, I attended community college that was just down the road. My hope was that it would make the jump from high school to college an easier transition. I soon found that one of the main differences was the fact that attendance was not as strictly enforced as it was in high school and, being a teenager, I immediately blew off classes in favor of just hanging out with friends or picking up that extra shift at the restaurant to earn more spending cash.
After taking classes here and there over the span of two and half years, I found paying bills to be a more pressing need than finishing school. Moving from one full-time job to the next and constantly putting of returning to school became the norm in my life. Not until I started with my current employer. did I stay with one job more than three years. What began as a temporary position became a .
