Reflection Paper
September_2010
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Course Name: Business Communications Location where you study: Hanoi Campus Title of Assignment: Reflection Paper File(s) submitted BUSM3320_G3_s3192494_Le Quoc
Trung_Reflection Paper
Student name: Le Quoc Trung Student e-mail address: S3192494@rmit.edu.vn Learning Facilitator in charge: Philip Large Assignment due date: 12/09/2010 Date of submission: 12/09/2010 Number of pages including this one: 9 Word Count: 1561 (excluding Cover Page, TOC)
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Acknowledgement
Via my reflection, I sincerely want to thank Mr. Philip Large our learning facilitator for Business Communications course. Throughout this course, he was devoted to supporting us whenever we have difficulties in understanding clearly the lectures, teaching us valuable knowledge and creating interesting activities closely related to real business environment. All of these things are really precious to us when working in multi-national firms in the near future. Especially, I want to thank my colleagues. Without your contribution, I cannot complete all given tasks during this course. The purpose of my reflection is to present what I acquired from Business Communications course a useful business course for students before graduating from university.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgement ................................. 3 Introduction ........................................... 5 Communication skills ............................. 5 Presentation skills .................................. 6 Writing an effective email ...................... 7 Inter-cultural communication ................ 8 Conclusion .............................................. 8
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Communication skills
In order to have a clear perception about the important role of communication in many aspects of this life, lets look at some disadvantages of poor communication. Actually, poor communication can affect the cohesiveness between members in the team significantly. Besides, it also has a great impact on making decisions as well as solving problems. I realized that on some first weeks of this course, communicating between members in my team was not effective. A question was raised in my thought: what are the main factors causing this problem? And I discovered that there are 3 main factors having great influence on communication. Firstly, about AGE. Almost members in our team are in the age range of 20 25. It could be considered as an advantage in sharing ideas because we are all young generation. Secondly, about GENDER. We have 4 young boys and 1 girl in our team. We have already known each other from previous semesters. Thus, we do not find any difficulties in developing our group. However, 4 young boys participating in a group also creates a problem. More specifically, sometimes, instead of focusing REFLECTION PAPER Page 5
Presentation skills
Through courses in RMIT University, I had many opportunities to get acquainted with different kinds of presentations. Once again, my presentation skills were trained, but in a professional way during Business Communications course. In fact, presentation is one of the most efficient methods to transfer ideas quickly to audiences. However, doing a presentation effectively is not easy as I expected. There are some problems I might face when presenting my ideas to colleagues, especially the CEO. One of these problems is about presentation speed. Sometimes, when giving a presentation, I speak a little bit fast. That will make my audiences find it is REFLECTION PAPER Page 6
Inter-cultural communication
With the rapid world development as well as the technology boom occurs on a large scale, this helps many countries all over the world getting closer and co-operating in various fields such as economics, politics, society, etc. This opens great opportunities for domestic business to expand the current market into other foreign countries. However, adapting to a new culture, more specifically, communicating with other people from different cultures is never an easy task to do. Based on what I acquired from the course Business Communications, there are many types of cultural differences such as society, religion, ethics, behavior, etc. These differences mainly occur in multi-national firms in which many types of people from different cultures working together. Like two sides of a coin, inter-cultural communication assists employees a lot in improving inter-personal perception about other cultures, however, it could creates conflicts in making decisions and resolving problems. Having a clear perception about cultural differences will support me a lot when working in the multi-national firm in the future. For instance, almost Eastern people dress formally than Western people or European people like to mention things directly and evaluate others based on real ability. Thus, understanding clearly these differences will increase the communication effectiveness significantly.
Conclusion
To conclude, participating in Business Communications course is really a new experience for me. Throughout this course, I had opportunities to explore other business aspects along with improving essential working skills professionally. Besides, with the support of my colleagues and especially the CEO, I also determined what are my strengths and weakness. In the future, I intend to work in a multi-national company where I have to deal with a variety of issues and be responsible for resolving them. Thus, knowledge and skills provided in Business REFLECTION PAPER Page 8
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