Bachelor of Commerce students Aidan, Erica, David and Shavindri worked together in Management Consulting during Semester 2, 2017. They recently received the exciting news that some of their proposed recommendations would be implemented by their client.
In Semester 2 2017, our team was given the opportunity to work on a business case, providing consulting during services to our client, the Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce(VACC). Our project involved evaluating the VACC accreditation system and presenting our proposals to the Senior Executive team.
"...several team members have already been able to draw on their Management Consulting experience for job interviews, to great success."
The team started off as four individual strangers. By the end of the semester, we became a cohesive unit. We bonded during weekly hours spent together, drawing on our diverse backgrounds, making compromises and going back to shared values. From day one, we were concious of deadlines. This helped us ensure that we consistantly made weekly progress. W e established team goals in our first meeting and afterwards, encouraged and motivated one another to work towards achieving our goals. We also developed useful sress management skills, given the fast-paced and demanding nature of the project.
Management Consulting took our team outside a familiar academic setting and placed us into an actual workplace. We engaged in weekly meetings with our client to discuss the progress of our project, and issues we needed to address. We gained practical experience in communicating with members from different levels of the organisation. We also learnt to filter through masses of information, to deliver a concise series of recommendations.
The overall experience with the VACC has been exceptionally useful for developing our professional skills and consequently improving our employability. We visited the client site weekly, and interreacted with industry professionals in-company. This gave us exposure to corporate culture, and the opportunity to engage diverse stakeholders; staff at the VACC ranged from technically trained mechanics to MBA and PhD graduates. We now feel confident in engaging with professionals from different backgrounds.
As is nature of many consulting projects, we were "thrown in at the deep end" without knowing how to swim. There was initial confusion while we were being trained, but the exposure to such a challenged forced quick learning and problem-solving. In relation to applying for jobs, this is a valuable experience from a employer's perspective, since workplace can bring pressured environments. In fact, several team members have already been able to draw on their Management Consulting experience for job interviews, to great success.
Much our delight, we were recently informed of the VACC's intentions to implement some of the business improvement recommendatins that our team proposed. This has affirmed the value of the subject and the extent to which we had developed our skills.