Running head: CAPSTONE – EVALUATION OF CAREER COMPETENCIES

Evaluation of Career Competencies
Western Governor’s University
Abstract

The evaluation of my career competencies was a difficult challenge to objectively complete. An assessment of my professional abilities proved to be as if I were pulling together my own performance evaluation at my job. Nonetheless, it has given me some good grounding to the areas where I’ve identified are career gaps which may be holding me back from advancing as well as clearly showing the areas in which I have a firm grasp with experience.
As identified, there are seven areas I needed to evaluate for strengths and weaknesses. All seven will be discussed throughout this work.

CAREER COMPETENCIES

Competencies Defined

As indicated in the abstract, trying to identify areas in which I am competent in versus not was a major effort. There were several introspective questions that I had to ask myself throughout the entire process including trying to make sense of where I would like to head in my career. I believe that this experience and exercise have helped me identify the areas which need additional focus and attention as well as those where I may already be proficient. Within this document, I will speak to different competencies in depth including a couple of which are key to the success of my desired career path. These are: • Leading people and teams • Influencing behavior • Team development and leadership • Developing sustainable solutions • Serving customers • Overall strategy • Marketing goods and services • Managing products and services • Managing technology and innovation • Assessing the competitive environment • Planning for the future in the global marketplace.
Leading People and Teams The required skills and expertise in the area of leading people and teams are wide. The knowledge baseline includes the ability to provide direction, gaining commitment and trust from your team, as well as giving clear direction and fostering collaboration among all members of the team and sometimes, even resolving conflict within members of the team productively. Within my career experience, I believe that I have fulfilled this area through my past role as a Group Manager with seven direct reports as well as several leading roles across cross-functional teams on numerous highly visible key projects within the company including but not limited to corporate merger integration activities. However, an area of opportunity is for me to widen the breadth of which teams I lead to possibly include senior executive leadership such as vice presidents and presidents. I have limited experience in the area of working with executive officers and I believe it would very beneficial for my career advancement to be able to routinely interact and interface with higher level managers within the corporation.
Influencing behavior The skill set to be able to influence behavior goes hand and in hand with leading people and teams. It would difficult to have a leader or manager cohesively working with a group of professionals who did not have the ability to influence behavior. Within the current work force environment, many of us work across corporate teams, in remote offices and often times than not work in different time zones. The manager’s capability to facilitate projects and activities to move forward by “influencing” teams to behave or work in a particular direction is pivotal to the team’s project(s) success. I would have to rely on my ability to positively influence my team(s) to continue to pursue a difficult customer, whether internal or external, in order to get an end result that was our desired outcome. The ability to influence key stakeholders opinions alone would often dictate whether a project would be able to