MY SKILLS

Reflective Essay

Reflective Essay

Introduction

The term teamwork never really made sense to me. I always believed that working alongside others would only create issues, every person would push forward their point of views and apart from getting involved in all this mess, it is rather better to work alone; be your boss and do things the way you like to do. However, I beg to differ from this standpoint now. I can undoubtedly say that I have gone through an eye opening experience which has completely shifted my perception about team working. I am a thorough believer of team work now, and can proudly claim that I fall somewhere between the scale of 6-7 on the skills assessment scale.

Discussion

Considering the fact that I had always been a supporter of working alone, one of the reasons why I believed in such a notion was because I found it difficult to communicate to people. Articulating my point of view was indeed the most difficult task, however, undergoing the lectures and various seminars since I came to this university, I can proudly say that I have drastically improved this feature of mine. As compared to before, I can now confidently communicate to others, explain my ideas with considerable ease and simultaneously listen to their views and respond accordingly. As according to Honey and Mumford's model of learning styles, I can label myself as a theorist in this particular aspect. This is because as described, theorists are those which consider the problems in a step by step manner (Mumford, 1995, p.5); this is something I have done over the past few months.

Though, I have always avoided writing any form of documents as I always found it hard to adhere to the guidelines set by the format requirements, but now I seldom find adhering to the same guidelines as tough. I have developed the skill of giving attention to pointing out the correct information and writing it all down in a manner which hardly has any traces of punctuation or grammatical errors. Following the activist learning style in this sphere, being open to new experiences and challenges (Van Zwanenberg, 2000, p.370), I have taken up the task of improving my written skills.

By participating in various presentations, I developed an understanding how to communicate to the audience through the use of graphs or pictures. Though, this is something that I still believe needs a lot of improvement, but as compared to before, my understanding of what to put, and how to reach out to a particular target audience has drastically improved. I would say I am in a state of assimilation, as described by Piaget, it is a phase where “an individual has developed new skills but is yet to shift his mindset sufficiently” (Huitt & Hummel, 2003, p.3).

My researching skills have gone through a radical improvement. I hadn't known how difficult researching for relevant material was, until I had to experience it firsthand, or as described as the concrete experience by Kolb (2001) who went ...