Career guidance and counseling can be helpful to choose the right career path because each career requires some special skill sets for success. Similarly, when embarking on a business career, it is important to have the right guidelines before selecting a specific direction. To excel in business you need to be intelligent, analytical, meticulous, motivated, dedicated, have good oral and written communication skills, and should be fluent with the use of modern technology. You also need to analyze whether you can fit into a team and work with other competitive people.
Deciding On The Aspect Of Business To Specialize In For Your Career
The word “business” covers many diverse activities. Therefore, deciding on what type of business you want to pursue is only one part of the decision. Another factor is what aspect of business you want to specialize in. You might be planning your career in finance, marketing, computing, or some other job within a business. You should also decide whether you want a home business career or a separate workplace.
Planning And Applying For Business Education
Choosing A Program
Careers in the business field offer many options to students, so when considering a career in business, it is important to consider your own strengths, skills and experience, as well as your interests. It is also important to take into consideration your long-term goal – whether you want to be the owner or a chief executive. The better you know and understand your own motivation for wanting a business career, the more likely you are to take the best decision for your future. Basic knowledge about the key aspects of running a business and how they inter-relate to one another is also important in order to make a correct decision.
Programs On Offer
-Certificate, diploma, and degree programs at business institutes and career schools.
-Diploma and degree programs at community colleges.
-Undergraduate programs at traditional colleges and universities:
-Graduate programs at colleges and universities:
-Online programs
For those seeking an entry-level position, companies may hire graduates of a certificate, associate degree or bachelor’s degree program. Entry-level courses, especially those for the business executive, give a broad outlook for a career in business and may include study of accounting, economics, finance, business communication, human relations, business law, management and organizational principles, and the use of computers in business. Major programs on offer by various business schools are MBA Programs, Accounting Programs, Business Administration Degrees, E-Commerce, Health Care Administration, Public Relations, and Human Resource Management, among others.
Applying To Business Schools
Generally, admission for higher education in the United States is based on high school grades, college admissions tests such as the ACT and the SAT, letters of recommendation, and an application completed by the student. There are various top business schools in the United States, such as Harvard and Stanford University.
Details of various business schools and their admission process can be found on the Internet.
Points That Need To Be Considered When Choosing The Right Business School
When investigating business degree and certificate programs, some of the general points that need to be considered are:
-The degree program should be state accredited.
-The flexibility of the programs offered.
-The career services that include job placement, a resume service, job fairs and networking opportunities, the fee connected with the career services offered, if any and the placement rate for graduates of the program.
-Program schedules to suit your needs – full-time or part-time school, evenings or weekends only and online or distance learning.
-The cost of the education. If you require financial aid, ask about scholarship, loans or grants available.
Some Careers In Business:
-Managers – Account Managers, IT Managers, Operations Managers
-Executive and Corporate Officers
-Administrative and Executive Assistants
-Accountants and other financial personnel, including tax accountants, payroll specialists, and credit & collections specialists.
-Supply-chain and Logistics specialists
-International business specials
-Business consultants
-Entrepreneurs
-Public-relations Personnel
-Human-resources personnel
Put Your Business Career into the Passing Lane with an Online MBA Degree
I remember the excitement that my MBA classmates shared with me while recruiters fawned over them making job offers that could lead to fast-track business careers. Naturally, everyone wanted either to eventually own a business or become the CEO of a business. The best that most new MBAs could hope for immediately, however, was to gain a place in a training program that would lead to an executive position or to become a consultant to senior management in a business.
It was a big commitment to earn a Harvard MBA to become a businessman. You had to live in the Boston area, work long hours every week, not earn much money for two years, and pay lots of tuition fees and expenses. Many classmates graduated with large loans that took many years to repay. Most people figured that they would finally be ahead of the game financially within five to ten years . . . or so they hoped.
Gaining the choice to make that big time and financial commitment was hard, too. Many more applicants were rejected than accepted in those days (it’s even more difficult to gain a place at Harvard now).
If you were over a certain age, you probably wouldn’t even consider taking this route. Why? The companies hiring from Harvard then were looking for relatively young talent with no more than five years of experience.
If you weren’t a person with an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university or someone who had excelled in the military, you probably didn’t even apply for admission into Harvard Business School. The odds against your acceptance were staggering.
To many people it seemed like the fast track to business success was a very narrow lane that was closed to them.
Fortunately, optimists abound among those who want to have good business careers. Many feel that if they can get a chance to prove themselves, they will stand out.
Experience supports this confidence: If we look at the leaders of many of the most successful companies, these people didn’t go through any hard-to-acquire educational experiences. These leaders proved themselves to be capable of getting things done on the job . . . not in the classroom.
Today, the fast track to a successful business career, a passing lane that puts you ahead of other people, is still an MBA . . . but increasingly that MBA is gained from an online school and is earned by someone who has at least twenty years of work experience and is holding down a full-time job. That combination of work and study used to be called “working your way through school” but now it has become the best way to get a practical education: You are able to use what you learn in school during your day job. This means faster advancement in a current job while gaining lots of experience in applying new learning to your work.
What are some of the benefits of this approach?
1. You gain credibility: Not everyone has an MBA degree.
2. You are considered for higher level jobs because you have a good education and lots of experience.
3. You arrive in your next job ready to do the work, rather than needing a lot more training.
4. Doing a good job in your first post-MBA position qualifies you for quick advancement into more senior positions.
5. You are likely to gain an earlier opportunity to build a substantial equity stake in your new employer.
Let’s look at Mr. Ralph R. Richey, a 2006 MBA graduate of Rushmore University (an online school) as an example of what can be done to help your business career. While in high school, Mr. Richey was accepted into a two-year apprentice program to become an electronic technician. After that, his curiosity about business led him to take courses in bookkeeping and management.
In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Mr. Richey decided to try a different life style and founded a music studio and a martial arts studio. He also fronted for a rock band, earned a music teacher’s certificate, and taught both music and martial arts. Having burned the proverbial candle at both ends while single, he decided to go back into a more conventional career after marrying.
During the 1980s, Mr. Richey owned or managed several companies offering fire and security alarms. He also developed an interest in Computer-Aided Design and took courses to become qualified to work in that emerging technology activity.
In the 1990s, he shifted to finance and helped raise millions of dollars for a high-tech marine manufacturing company. In the 2000s, he switched his expertise into raising money for real estate development and had the misfortune to attract a fraudulent lending company which didn’t meet its commitments. That misfire set him back, and he refocused his attention again.
Mr. Richey decided to go into technology management, looking for a senior level position. People didn’t take him seriously because he lacked a business degree.
Spurred by that realization, he enrolled at Rushmore in early 2005 and graduated less than two years later while holding down a demanding full-time job. He picked Rushmore because he would get credit for 30 years of work experience, would study under experienced executives as his professors, and would have a chance to apply his learning to his job.
At the time he enrolled, Mr. Richey hoped to use his MBA studies to either start a successful technology consulting business or to be hired as a senior executive in an established technology company with a six-figure salary.
How did he do after graduation?
His first job was a four-week temporary assignment to be the controller for a division of a construction company consortium that paid within his target salary range. Within 18 months, he advanced to become the full-time CFO of the entire consortium. Candidly, he feels that he wouldn’t have even landed an interview for his current job without his MBA degree form Rushmore.
Mr. Richey reports that “I have a new sense of personal satisfaction from earning my degree, which in turn has provided a new sense of financial security.”
Imagine where Mr. Richey’s career might be today if he had earned that MBA degree twenty years earlier.
What’s the lesson? The passing lane that can speed you into a highly successful career is available through earning a low-cost, online MBA degree while you keep your current job. You gain a lot of upside potential at little cost in time and effort.
Years of reading through poems by all kinds of different writers in my high school and later college textbooks really made me learn one thing. I only appreciate poetry by one man, Edgar Allan Poe. I had never read a whole lot of him until I took an English class to fulfill a general college requirement that was just about the horror genre. We obviously read a lot of Poe then.
The other day when I was shopping for some new alma mater gear online with my Hughes Net, I was reminded that I’m especially grateful to college for properly introducing me to the man’s work.
I’ve read all the Poe poems so many times that I lost count years ago. That’s the best thing about poetry, you don’t have to spend a lot of time to get pleasure out of them or even reread them if you don’t understand them the first time around. Also, I can never read a poem just once because most are open to so many interpretations that it takes a while to figure out which one you believe.