Development of business skills of students: four teaching advice

The skills necessary to solve problems, persuade and lead a project are essential for a business career. So how can university professors teach these fundamental capacities to students? Here are four teaching tips that should help students refine key commercial skills.

Underline the pains. There is undoubtedly much to learn stories of success, but there is a real gold to dig in the failures of organizations. Study case studies. Guide students to examine a business, identify your points of pain, learn to read the signs when a company is likely to fail and propose solutions.

Take Amazon fresh as an example. It is an online and physical grocery store that offers a delivery service in selected countries. Amazon Prime members can order online in the Amazon application for delivery the same day. Students are invited to identify challenges likely to emerge in such daily operations. Amazon Fresh wants to improve the purchasing experience, connect customers with suppliers and respond more quickly to customer comments. Ask students to offer solutions using existing resources of the company – Amazon is a global distributor and a leading company in the Internet of Things – and based on the latest technologies. Students must be guided to examine whether these problems can present new commercial opportunities.

Study a real business through primary sources. Help students overcome the inevitable challenge to try to apply classroom learning to solve real commercial problems by adopting The case study method of the Harvard Business School. This takes successful companies and in difficulty inside and outside China and asks students to analyze their performance by independent research and group discussion. Students present their analysis to the class, then must answer the difficult questions of their peers. This puts them in the role of “business manager”, offering an overview of what the company heads examined are faced during decision -making.

Encourage students to select a private company more accessible to them for a close study to help them fill the lake of knowledge between major brand case studies and daily business management. Unlike case studies that are largely based on secondary sources, when students study the real companies around them, they can contact business owners, managers and customers to collect information for the analysis and application of statistical skills they have acquired in class.

In the end, students can use the main source information they gather to compile a business report, which gives an overview of the company, reveals its strengths and points of pain, provides for all crises and creates a commercial strategy. Students must be invited to write case study reports and present their commercial strategy to the rest of the class. This will help sharpen their writing skills, their speech in public and their persuasion techniques.

Appreciate the value of the dialogue. Create opportunities for students to communicate directly with business owners and high -level managers. For example, invite business leaders to seminars or specific conferences at university or program as guest speakers. Many of our business students are extremely interested in starting their own companies. We therefore invite the founders, entrepreneurs and executive directors of the industries who develop the curiosity of students, such as 3D and AI printing, to share their ideas and challenges in the creation and management of companies.

These conferences or guest seminars should not focus solely on “teacher conversation”. Encourage students to engage in dialogue, exchange ideas with guest speakers and even challenge them. Guide students to compare different perspectives to the same question and find the best approach thanks to group discussion.

Develop leadership skills through group projects. Each company needs effective leadership. Engaging students in group projects helps develop their leadership skills. Divide your class into study groups. These study groups simulate the micro-ecosystem of a real workplace, where different personalities must coexist and collaborate towards an objective.

Make sure that each group has students from various ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds to promote intercultural teamwork. Cultural conscience is an essential quality among world entrepreneurs. We work with other institutions from around the world such as Copenhagen Business School and the University of British Columbia to support intercultural education by bringing together our students. An Indonesian business student who joined the tripartite exchange program with these coordinated establishments by Cuhksz observed from his group that “Vancouver's student tends to be enthusiastic about technology, while Copenhagen students think of sustainability all the time”.

Each group contains around six students. The team elects a project manager who supervises and takes care of the team, and all agree on the tasks distributed to each individual thanks to the group discussion. Each member of the team selects a specific area on which to concentrate – in our case, cloud computing, AI, blockchain, virtual reality, the Internet of Things and 3D printing. They are then responsible for providing valuable information from the point of view of the designated area. The most common challenge that a project manager faces is to manage conflicts. Different opinions cause tensions in decision -making and different levels of engagement can disrupt the balance of the team. Students must learn that conflicts do not necessarily injure a team and can be a source of creativity. Students with different opinions must learn to coexist and to appreciate the ideas that others bring so that the team can move towards its common goal. At the end of the project, everyone in the team assesses and classifies the performance of the other. This rearuction by peers teaches students a lot on themselves. A prosperous business manager must be able to work in the context of a team and attend in different roles if necessary.

Qi li is assistant professor at the management and economy school, and Rosemary Bai is Marketing Coordinator for First Cycle International Admissions, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

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