Strategies for Developing Interpersonal Communication Skills for Business Students by Sharon A. Pope M.B.A., Cleveland State University, 1995 M.S.H.P/A., University of Cincinnati, 1983 B.Ed., University of Toledo, 1981 Doctoral Study Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education Walden University December 2015 Research has shown that interpersonal communication skills (ICS) are important for employment success, particularly if they are learned by students during college. A private university in Ohio identified the need to enhance students' ICS; however, the university's faculty lacked strategies to teach those required skills. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to investigate perceptions of key administrative staff (KAS), faculty, and alumni about the implementation of ICS instruction to foster students' work-ready skills. Guided by the social skill component of Goleman's emotional intelligence theory and related research, this study examined key applications of ICS including communication, collaboration, conflict management, and cross cultural awareness. Three KAS with extensive knowledge of university practices were purposefully sampled to take part in a focus group addressing current and recommended ICS instructional strategies. Network sampling, informed by the KAS, identified 23 faculty members who completed an open-ended online questionnaire and 4 alumni who participated in semi-structured interviews targeting their perceptions of ICS in the classroom. In addition to these sources of data, the researcher's reflective journal was analyzed to examine implementation and perceptions of current and alternate ICS instructional strategies. Data were transcribed, reviewed, then coded inductively without a prior list of codes resulting themes of presenting, self-branding, group/team work, networking, global awareness, and diversity. These findings were used to create a faculty professional development series on effective ICS instruction that can be used to promote positive social change for the university, students, and community by preparing graduates ready for success in the workforce.

Not every project deserving of success achieves it. Conversely, not every project heading for the scrap heap arrives. The journey to project success is long and hard and does not happen overnight. To understand the journey to project success we need to understand what makes a project successful. A successful project can be classified as a Project of which the costs did not exceed 25% of the agreed capital approved with a less than 25% schedule slip and with all the operational problems being sorted out in less than a year. Project success potential, can be increased by focusing on the critical factors listed in this study, namely: Project Front End Loading (FEL), high calibre project teams, and people skills/soft skills of project management. The success of a project can be increased when the project has high calibre project teams starting the project with very effective Front End Loading (FEL) and keep project team members continuity based on the fact that the project is managed by a project manager understanding people who have the soft skill to lead and influence the project team, rather than managing the team. The research was conducted by means of a literature and empirical study. The literature study documents the critical factors for project success. Knowledge gained from the literature study formed the basis for the empirical study to test critical factors for project success in practice and the recommendations can be read in chapter four. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

The military leadership is a specific type of activity, presenting motivational, emotional and intellectual chellenges to the character of a military leader. The United States Army defines leadership as 'the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and inproving the organization' (Department of the Army 2006, pp. 1-2).The United States Air Force (USAF) has the similar definition of leadership: 'the art and science of influencing and directing people to accomplish the assigned mission' (Department of the Air Force 2006, p.1). In these two definitions we can quite clearly highlight two important elements, which are inherent to the leadership process, it is the mission to lead people and followers who should perform delivered tasks. In our opinion, the army has achieved a big success in the development of leadership unlike other organizations, because the issue of leadeship was arising in the military sphere much earlier than in civil organizations. In proof of this position, we can recall scientific works, which were written by such great people as Sun Tzu (The Art of War, about 500-600 B.C.), Maurice (The Strategikon, 6th or 7th century A.D.) and Carl von Clausewitz (On War, published in 1832).

Not every project deserving of success achieves it. Conversely, not every project heading for the scrap heap arrives. The journey to project success is long and hard and does not happen overnight. To understand the journey to project success we need to understand what makes a project successful. A successful project can be classified as a Project of which the costs did not exceed 25% of the agreed capital approved with a less than 25% schedule slip and with all the operational problems being sorted out in less than a year. Project success potential, can be increased by focusing on the critical factors listed in this study, namely: Project Front End Loading (FEL), high calibre project teams, and people skills/soft skills of project management. The success of a project can be increased when the project has high calibre project teams starting the project with very effective Front End Loading (FEL) and keep project team members continuity based on the fact that the project is managed by a project manager understanding people who have the soft skill to lead and influence the project team, rather than managing the team. The research was conducted by means of a literature and empirical study. The literature study documents the critical factors for project success. Knowledge gained from the literature study formed the basis for the empirical study to test critical factors for project success in practice and the recommendations can be read in chapter four. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

The objective of this work was to analyze the career skills of students of the Faculty of Economics of the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice in relation to the subsequent career of graduates in selected work positions. The thesis works with the database of personality test results of students and with the database of graduate students. The work is examining whether there are statistical differences between the students of different study programs. Results of soft skills of graduates are compared to soft skills established by NSP.

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Technology (Discipline: Information Technology) in the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology / Women in South Africa are under-represented in senior management positions in the Information technology (IT) sector — even with available incentives and directives to rectify the situation. The purpose of this research is to explore and understand the reasons for the imbalance in representation of women in senior management positions in the IT sector in South Africa. Seventeen women in middle to senior management positions from two of South Africa’s nine provinces — Western Cape and Gauteng — were interviewed for this study. The women were asked to relate their personal experiences and perceptions around organizational culture in IT environments and factors influencing their career advancements. A qualitative content analysis method was used to analyse the responses from the interviews. The findings of this study confirm the imbalanced representation of women in senior management positions. It was found that organizations are open and welcoming and provide opportunities to women, but women in the IT sector do not necessarily desire to advance to senior management positions. Factors such as the legacy in the IT industry where men held senior positions, career interruptions due to child bearing, and the absence of female mentor’s impact on the career advancement of women. The informal recruitment process for senior manager positions and the lack of emphasis on the need for women in IT when advertising senior management positions worsen the situation. Women lack self-confidence and are of the opinion that their skills set must be an exact match to the job requirements before applying for senior positions. Work life balance is not supported in the IT environment and no development programs aimed specifically at women are available. The paucity of women taking up technical careers — such as IT — limits the number of women available to develop and appoint in senior management positions. Guidelines for women to advance to senior positions and for companies to recruit and hire women are proposed. These guidelines will assist to correct the imbalance representation of women in senior management positions and promote IT as a career for women. A suggestion for future studies is to compare career advancement of women working in the software development environments, compared to women in the infrastructure and technical environments of IT, as well as those who have left the IT industry.

El objetivo principal de esta tesis es desarrollar un plan de negocios para la creación de una empresa basada en una plataforma de venta de cursos online. Inicialmente, el público objetivo serán los líderes de la pequeña y mediana empresa local y a largo plazo la comunidad empresarial de habla hispana. En la actualidad el uso intensivo del Internet ha generado una revolución en diversas áreas, como el entretenimiento, la productividad, las transacciones comerciales, las capacitaciones entre muchas más. En nuestro caso las capacitaciones, o cursos en línea, han creado una verdadera democratización de la educación, cada día los precios bajan y la calidad mejora. En cualquier parte del mundo, una persona con un Smartphone y acceso a internet puede recibir un entrenamiento de calidad con muy baja inversión o gratis. Todas las instituciones educativas tradicionales de primer nivel, han iniciado en la última década sus procesos de transformación digital hacia esta tendencia. La investigación de la competencia, nos ayudó a desarrollar una estrategia de diferenciación para ingresar al mercado. Empresas exitosas orientadas a la capacitación como CREHANA y PLATZI buscaron en sus primeras etapas la especialización como diferenciación. CREHANA inició orientada al diseño digital y web, migrando al mediano plazo a todos los temas creativos. PLATZI inició especializándose en programación, diversificando su cartera a mediano plazo con temas como la tecnología en general, el emprendimiento, el marketing digital y el desarrollo personal. En nuestro caso, gracias a los estudios de mercado, entrevistas de profundidad e investigando las tendencias, la especialización será orientada a temas de habilidades blandas, mejora de clima laboral y la empatía, todo orientado a crear culturas organizacionales FELICES para que logren ser más PRODUCTIVAS. Por tal razón el nombre tentativo de esta plataforma seria PRODUCTIVIDADFELIZ.ORG / The main objective of this thesis is to develop a business plan for the creation of a company based on a platform for selling online courses. Initially, the target audience will be the leaders of the small and medium-sized local business and in the long term the Spanish-speaking business community. At present, the intensive use of the Internet has generated a revolution in several areas, such as entertainment, productivity, commercial transactions, training among others. In our case, the trainings, or online courses, have created a true democratization of education, every day, prices fall and quality improves. Anywhere in the world, a person with a Smartphone and Internet access can receive quality training with very low investment or free. All the traditional educational institutions of first level, have initiated in the last decade their processes of digital transformation towards this tendency. The competition research helped us to develop a differentiation strategy to enter the market. Successful companies oriented to training, such as CREHANA and PLATZI, sought in their early stages the specialization for differentiation. CREHANA started with digital and web design, migrating in the medium term to all creative themes. PLATZI started specializing in programming, diversifying its portfolio in the medium term with topics such as general technology, entrepreneurship, digital marketing and personal development. In our case, thanks to market studies, in-depth interviews and trends analysis. The specialization will be oriented to soft skills, work climate improvement and empathy, all aimed at creating HAPPY organizational cultures so that they can be MORE PRODUCTIVE. For this reason the tentative name of this platform would be PRODUCTIVIDADFELIZ.ORG / Tesis

La presente investigación tiene por objetivo la creación de una plataforma web útil para conectar a especialistas y clientes que deseen desarrollar y potenciar sus habilidades blandas. De este modo, mediante dicha plataforma web se brindará la mejor calidad en el servicio y máxima seguridad para afianzar la confianza con los usuarios. Asimismo, se llevará a cabo un minucioso trabajo al momento de captar a los instructores, esto con el fin de garantizar el máximo desempeño en cada charla que se brinde. La idea de negocio surge a consecuencia de una necesidad por parte de las personas que no tienen desarrolladas correctamente sus habilidades blandas, esto ocasiona que no consigan el empleo deseado u otros problemas cotidianos. Por ello, en los primeros conceptos se conocerá a profundidad los temas a tratar para y así llegar a un entendimiento eficaz del proyecto, tales como, estudios de mercado, experimentos, validaciones, resultados, entre otros. Por último, el análisis del presente trabajo a efectuar es para dar a conocer si existe la posibilidad de crear un negocio viable a corto, mediano y largo plazo. En este caso, se observarán múltiples estrategias y planes de acción para lograr dicho objetivo, tales como, concierges, proyección de ventas, financiamiento, entre otros. / The present research aims to create a useful web platform to connect specialists and clients who wish to develop and enhance their soft skills. In this way, through said web platform, the best quality of service and maximum security will be provided to strengthen trust with users. Likewise, a meticulous work will be carried out when recruiting the instructors, this in order to guarantee maximum performance in each talk that is given. The business idea arises as a result of a need by people who do not have their soft skills properly developed, this causes them not to get the desired job or other daily problems. Therefore, in the first concepts, the topics to be discussed will be known in depth in order to reach an effective understanding of the project, such as market studies, experiments, validations, results, among others. Finally, the analysis of this work to be carried out is to make known if there is the possibility of creating a viable business in the short, medium and long term. In this case, multiple strategies and action plans will be observed to achieve this objective, such as concierges, sales projection, financing, among others. / Trabajo de investigación

The aim of this thesis is to analyse empirically, proposing new methods to tackle disputed questions in the literature of political and labour economics, the Italian institutional setting both in a political competition context and in the occupational structure. The first paper explores the relationship between transfers from central state to political aligned municipalities and the effect of these transfers on local electoral consensus. This study contributes to the empirical literature of the political determinants of spikes in central transfers in pre-electoral periods and of the electoral benefits of pork barrel measures for incumbent politicians. Despite several findings of strong evidence that intergovernmental fiscal transfers rise during election years, in the Italian case researchers investigated little the political incentives that lay behind these increases or the success of these transfers in attracting votes. We focus on the so called swing municipalities, defined as those in which the probability of winning is close to one-half, analysing data of Italian comuni with more than 15 000 inhabitants, in the period 2007-2014. From an empirical perspective, every attempt to estimate the causal impact of political alignment on the amount of federal transfers is clearly complicated by endogeneity issues. Without a credible source of exogenous variation in political alignment, the empirical correlation between alignment and transfers (if any) can be completely driven by socio-economic factors influencing both dimensions. We propose a new model specification to account for the endogeneity issue arising when estimating the causal impact of political alignment on transfers: the unpredicted change in the government occurred in 2011 after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi and the following appointment of Mario Monti as prime minister. We perform our empirical estimation in two steps: first, we apply the close-race RDD setup (Lee 2008) to assess the impact of political alignment on transfers. Results from the close-race RDD show that aligned municipalities receive more grants, with this effect being stronger before elections. At a second empirical stage, we perform a local linear regression of the re-election probability of the local incumbent on transfers, including the first stage error term to have our coefficient of interest measuring only the effect of politically-driven transfers on electoral outcomes, and we conclude that this probability increases as grants increase. The second paper stems from the observation of the most recent phenomena in the domestic and foreign labour market: technological progress has been associated to a crowding-out of cognitive-skill intensive jobs in favour of jobs requiring soft skills, such as social intelligence, flexibility and creativity. Soft skills can be defined as interpersonal, human, people or behavioural skills necessary for applying technical skills and knowledge in the workplace. The nature of the soft skills make them hardly replaceable by machine work, and Among soft skills, creativity is one of the hardest to define and to codify, therefore, creativity-intensive occupations have been shielded from automation. In our work, we focus on creativity, starting from its definition in order to get significant insights on which occupational profiles in Italy can be considered creative and to explore their dynamics in the labour market. A possible analytical definition of creativity comes from the seminal work of Edward De Bono. According to his pioneering research in the field, lateral thinking is strictly related to creativity and it can be described along four dimensions: 1) fluidity, as the ability of a subject to give the highest possible number of answers to a certain question; 2) flexibility, as the number of categories to which we can bring back these questions; 3) originality: ability of expressing new and innovative ideas; 4) processing: ability of realizing concretely one’s ideas. We apply this definition to a uniquely detailed occupational dataset on tasks, skills, work attitudes, and working conditions regarding all Italian occupations: the Inapp-Istat Survey on Occupations (Indagine Campionaria sulle Professioni, ICP hereafter), an O*NET-type dataset developed by the Italian National Institute for Public Policy Analysis. The Survey on Occupations, in fact, presents a list of skills and competences and workers are asked to identify those they make use of in performing their job. Inside this list, we identify 25 skills associated to creativity and we formulate a Matrix Completion (MC) optimization problem, as discussed theoretically in Mazumder (2010). Matrix Completion is the task of filling in the missing entries of a partially observed matrix, which we generate by obscuring randomly 10%, 25% and 50% of the entries in the columns associated with the creative skills, given a fixed row (occupation). In our analysis, we use a formulation of the problem known as Nuclear Norm Minimization and we solve it with the Soft Impute Algorithm. We conclude our analysis on social skills in our third paper where we analyse the effects of Covid-19 pandemic on soft skills in the context of Italian occupations, operating in about 100 economic sectors. We leverage detailed information from ICP, the Italian O*Net, and we simulate the impact of Covid-19 on those workplace characteristics and working style that were more seriously hit by the lockdown measures and the new sanitary dispositions (physical proximity, face-to-face discussions, working remotely, ecc.). We simulate three possible scenarios based on the intensity of the effects of COVID-19 on some working conditions, such as working from home, keeping physical distance and so on. We then apply matrix completion, a machine learning technique used in recommendation systems, in order to predict the levels of soft skills required for each occupation when working conditions change, as these changes might be persistent in the near future. Professions showing a lower intensity in the use of soft skills, with respect to the predicted one, are exposed to a deficit in their soft-skill endowment, which might ultimately lead to lower productivity or higher unemployment, thus enhancing the negative effects of the pandemic.

Escuela Peruana de Buenas Prácticas es un proyecto de negocio que consiste en la formación y desarrollo de habilidades blandas como empatía, comunicación verbal y no verbal, adaptación a los cambios, entre otros. Creemos que es importante poder gestionar estas técnicas para la solución de problemas, aprender a trabajar en equipo, ser líder, reducir el nivel de estrés y otros aspectos que ayuden al desarrollo de una formación que impulse al estudiante debido a que, en el Perú, el sistema educativo solo está enfocado en asignaturas básicas como matemática, comunicación, ciencias, entre otros cursos. Sin embargo, en los últimos años se ha demostrado la importancia de enseñar habilidades blandas para la toma asertiva de decisiones tanto en la vida personal como profesional. Ante esta situación, en el rubro educativo peruano existen pocos centros de preparación dedicados al desarrollo de estos cursos con una propuesta diferente. En ese sentido, este proyecto de negocio busca cubrir esta necesidad con una propuesta de valor que radica en un centro especializado que se encargará de desarrollar habilidades blandas en niños y adolescentes con docentes de larga experiencia. La Escuela Peruana de Buenas Prácticas tendrá como fuente de ingresos el pago de los padres de familia que matriculen a sus hijos, por lo cual nos dirigiremos a todos los centros educativos privados de nivel primaria y secundaria apoyándonos en campañas que nos permitan mostrar nuestra propuesta de valor. / Peruvian School of Good Practices is a business project that consists of the training and development of soft skills such as empathy, verbal and non-verbal communication, adaptation to changes, among others. We believe that it is important to be able to manage these techniques to solve problems, learn to work as a team, be a leader, reduce the level of stress and other aspects that help the development of a training that encourages the student because, in Peru, the educational system is only focused on basic subjects such as mathematics, communication, science, among other courses. However, in recent years the importance of teaching soft skills for assertive decision making has been demonstrated both in personal and professional life. Faced with this situation, in the Peruvian educational sector there are few preparation centers dedicated to the development of these courses with a different proposal. In this sense, this business project seeks to cover this need with a value proposition that lies in a specialized center that will be in charge of developing soft skills in children and adolescents with long-term teachers. The Peruvian School of Good Practices will have as a source of income the payment of parents who enroll their children, for which we will go to all private primary and secondary education centers, supporting ourselves in campaigns that allow us to show our proposal of value. / Trabajo de investigación