Week 10: Biggest Takeaway from MGMT 548

 “What is the most important thing that you learned in this class?” 

I find this type of question to be one of the more difficult ones to answer because I take it seriously and because often I have found graduate courses to be a collection of small things that create a wealth of knowledge. My instinct says that the Play to Your Strengths graduate project will end up being a huge takeaway because of the wonderfulness that is hearing strengths from others. I appreciate the feedback gathered because it is eye opening and informative to hear how I show up to other people. Putting those strengths into a job description to create my dream job will be super helpful as a I engage in career searches this summer. However, I’m not done with that project yet so I won’t use that example.

From the past nine weeks, I would say that the most important thing that I learned in this class was predictors of potential performance. Even the word ‘predictor’ was a stumbler for me since I do not have an HR background and had never heard that term in the hiring context before. The ability to predict potential performance in the job candidates feels like a crucial, yet slightly elusive concept. I had not considered, from the hiring perspective, how relevant measuring future performance is yet how difficult it is to do.  

My frame of reference around hiring was job descriptions and doing interviews. However, the hiring realm has changed and now there are criterion and predictors and validity and tests. The testing was another interesting piece of knowledge gained because I didn’t think of an interview as a test, but I can see how it is a way of measuring a candidate’s experience, personality, and future potential to try to find the best fit.  

Testing goes further into personality tests, cognitive tests, integrity tests, job skill tests, and more. This, again, was new to me because of the way I was recruited for my last few jobs, I haven’t had exposure to much of testing. The relevance of the tests and the awareness of a test’s impact on subgroups are both points that I learned about and will pay attention to in the future. I appreciated in this class that we were able to acknowledge disparities and what is available now to try to address or improve them. 

Predictors of future potential performance is a topic that was new to me this term. I am happy to have studied it from the perspective of my future self who will be hiring for a team one day. I am also happy to have learned about it now as a job seeker because it can help me prepare for what may be in the interview process as well as how to best present myself and information about me to demonstrate my future performance potential.  


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