Week 3: Negotiate and Persuade your way to your Graduate Career

Hi Everyone,

I’m an ICAEW Campus Ambassador currently studying English and Drama at the University of Kent. I’m doing a series of weekly blogs for 6 weeks about the skills I learned studying Business Administration and Mandarin at the University of California Berkeley’s Haas Business School. These blogs cover what skills employees look for and how you can foster these in yourself to ensure you get the graduate job you want.

In this blog I will talk about some well-practiced, solid techniques used by business professionals in order to negotiate and persuade. I want to talk about these skills as they’ll hopefully help you in your application for a graduate position and also in your future business environment. You may be expected to conduct short presentations; perhaps delivering information which you know will not necessarily be well received by the audience, so it’s good to be prepared.

It's Performing Not Presenting

In one of my classes at Berkeley, Dekker Communications, who offer training programs to prepare anyone to speak with influence mentored us for a day. They shared with us some of their key presentation principles which are regularly taught to top company executives in the US.

Their top tips were:

1) Keep it Simple – instead of having reams of boring text on a PowerPoint, replace words with images, multimedia and importantly your own enthusiasm. The audience should be looking at you, not reading a book behind you.

2) It’s not what you say, but how you say it – it’s well known that the majority of communication is done first visually, through body language and then vocally through voice tones. When presenting you should focus on posture, keeping good eye contact, varying your vocal tone and speed and most importantly, putting emotion into your speech.

3) Speak from the heart – people make designs based on emotions and then justify it with rationality. This is why you should evoke the audience’s emotions by telling personal and unique examples or stories from your life when you can in your presentation.

Within your career, you will undoubtedly have to deliver information which people won’t like, for example, radical proposed changes to a client’s company. How do you deal with these instances when the audience objects?

Kurt Beyer, teacher of my entrepreneurship class, CEO and advisor for start-ups, suggests the ‘Yes, and’ principle. ‘When you present’, he says ‘it’s important to stay flexible and take the audiences point of view’. So if an audience member suggests something rivalling your opinion, don’t simply ignore it. Accept it, say ‘Yes’, then ‘and’, going on to suggest your opinion.

This came in use when being grilled by a panel of angel investors during a presentation. We were pitching our idea of a new quick and simple keypad app for smartphones and tablets. One member questioned me on the relevance of the idea, suggesting that ‘Apple’s Siri software is slowly replacing the need for a keypad entirely’. I said ‘Yes’, I agreed that growing improvements in Siri’s voice recognition means that you just have to speak and your text will appear. Then I added, ‘and we will become the go to app when speaking is not possible, like in a meeting, class or busy train. Not only does this technique establish a good relationship but also allows new ideas to be considered that would have been ignored before.

As ever, if you have any comments or questions at all, please go ahead and I’ll help you any way I can.

Next week I will be sharing with you something that will put you head and shoulders above the competition. So make sure you join me next week!



If you’re still hungry for more tips on presenting, here’s a list of my favorite online resources:

Present Like Steve Jobs - http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/223513

Creating a Presentation -http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/create_presentations_an_audien.html

Harvard Business Review - http://hbr.org/video/2235534261001/why-you-need-a-state-of-the-company-address

Deker Communications -http://www.speakernetnews.com/tsem/handouts/Decker_HomeRun.pdf

If you’ve been inspired by reading this blog, it may surprise you that all of these skills are used in a graduate career as an ICAEW Chartered Accountant.

Discover how you can become an ICAEW Chartered Accountant at http://www.icaew.com/careers

See when the ICAEW Student Recruitment Team (UK) will be on your campus this autumn and message them at http://www.facebook.com/icaewcareers

Week 2: Presenting: Passing Assessment Centres with Flying Colours

Hi Everyone,

I’m an ICAEW Campus Ambassador currently studying English and Drama at the University of Kent. I’m doing a series of weekly blogs for 6 weeks about the skills I learned studying Business Administration and Mandarin at the University of California Berkeley’s Haas Business School. These blogs cover what skills employees look for and how you can foster these in yourself to ensure you get the graduate job you want.

In this blog, I will talk about how my experiences in my year abroad improved my presentation skills and the importance of presentation skills when applying for graduate jobs, especially during graduate employer assessment centres.

With big competition for sought-after graduate jobs, assessment centres have now become an important part of the recruitment process. And as part of this, so have presentations. For many of us, myself included, the words ‘assessed presentation’ can bring a pang of terror! So hopefully the next two blogs will provide useful suggestions on how to improve your presentation skills.

You may be asked to present on a specific topic at short-notice at the assessment centre, but more likely you will have been asked in advanced, so there’s plenty of time to practise. And as ever, practise makes perfect, and taking the opportunity to present as much as possible is the best way to improve your skills. Often, you can find these opportunities in your classes. For instance, one of the best classes I did in California was ‘Entrepreneurship’, where we launched a mobile tech product and ultimately presented the idea and company to a panel of investors. On top of this, I was involved in two assessed ‘Real Estate’ presentations where knowing the figures off the top of my head was essential. These were stressful; but throwing yourself in the deep end like this, is often the best way to improve. 

At the same time, real improvement only comes when you do something regularly. So the challenge of doing weekly presentations in my ‘Leadership’ class developed a tolerance to failure. The teacher made it very clear that we shouldn't worry about messing up, which many of us regularly did, me included. What was important was that we were getting up and doing it with about 10 minutes preparation. As a result, the whole class developed a very supportive atmosphere and we all saw tremendous improvements in our presentation skills, mainly because we were losing our fear and speaking spontaneously. Put simply, you have to practice and do so regularly.

So make sure you get practising any way you can!

As ever, if you have any comments or questions at all please go ahead and I’ll be sure to get help any way I can.

Next week I will be sharing with you some well-practiced, solid techniques used by business professionals in order to negotiate and persuade, so you can create the perfect pitch. So be sure to join me next week!





For more information about assessment centres visit the ICAEW website at:

http://careers.icaew.com/school-students-leavers/Student-support/Careers-advisers

If you’ve been inspired by reading this blog, it may surprise you that all of these skills are used in a graduate career as an ICAEW Chartered Accountant.

Discover how you can become an ICAEW Chartered Accountant at http://www.icaew.com/careers

See when the ICAEW Student Recruitment Team (UK) will be on your campus this autumn and message them at http://www.facebook.com/icaewcareers

Week 1: Building your Professional Communication Skills and Teamwork in Preparation for your Graduate Career

Hi Everyone, 

I’m an ICAEW Campus Ambassador currently studying English and Drama at the University of Kent. I’m doing a series of weekly blogs for 6 weeks about the skills I learned studying Business Administration and Mandarin at the University of California Berkeley’s Haas Business School. These blogs cover what skills employees look for and how you can foster these in yourself to help you get the graduate job you want.

UC Berkeley Campus

In my blog this week, I’m talking about how my personal experiences during my year aboard helped me improve my skills as a team player; a quality highly prized by graduate employers across all professions. I also want to talk about how my experiences improved my communication skills and the importance of having these skills in the workplace.

Increasingly, employers from all professions are looking for evidence of your extracurricular activities that show communication skills and team work. Employers want to see that you have a ‘life outside of work’. A great way of doing this is to get involved in sports teams or societies at your university. On your CV and in interviews you can then highlight how you built the essential skills of teamwork and communication that employers are looking for.

For example on my year abroad, I got involved as an actor for three different plays that were being directed by students at the university. These kinds of activities not only show you have an active life outside studying, but offer an opportunity to improve teamwork.

When working in a small group, communication skills become very important. Especially when performing in Macbeth on an almost pitch black stage! We had to really listen to the director, take on board their constructive criticism and be ready to put forward our own ideas as well. It was also important to build genuine friendly relationships with the cast members with whom I so closely worked with.

One important lesson that I learned is never to criticise your fellow actors, even if you’re trying to help. Statements like ‘I would have done it like this…’ don’t go down well. In the workplace it is important to understand that everyone has their own way of doing things. It is the boss’s place to nudge people in the right direction. I learned that it is very important be positive and supportive, especially when people are about to perform in front of hundreds of people! If you’re going to give advice to fellow employees, it should be given in a helpful and positive light.

I will take forward the respect of everyone’s differences, as that’s what makes a good team so diverse.

One of the most desired core competencies that the world’s largest professional services firm PwC looks for is being able to communicate with impact and empathy. So if you want to build your professional communication skills and teamwork in preparation for your graduate career, here’s your excuse to take a break from revision. Get involved in your universities extra-curricular activities and make sure to tell your dream employer about it!

If you have any comments or questions at all please go ahead and I’ll be sure to get help any way I can.

In my next two blogs, I will be giving tips on one of the most important, but also one of the most potentially terrifying skills of all: presenting. So be sure to join me next week!





If you want to check PwC’s other recommended Core Competencies then take a look at their online employability booklet for graduates:

http://www.pwc.co.uk/careers/webadmin/documents/student/2013/employability.pdf

If you’ve been inspired by reading this blog, it may surprise you that all of these skills are used in a graduate career as an ICAEW Chartered Accountant.

Discover how you can become an ICAEW Chartered Accountant at http://www.icaew.com/careers

See when the ICAEW Student Recruitment Team (UK) will be on your campus this autumn and message them at https://www.facebook.com/icaewcareers