CIM students and graduates hold high expectations for the return on the CIM qualification. Many expect high salaries and corner offices after graduation. I'll share some thoughts and ideas about how the process of getting a CIM qualification complicates the graduates' ability to be successful right after graduation and what The Knowledge Factory does as a standard practice.
Failan Saleem
MD/Principal Lecturer
The Knowledge Factory |
To achieve coaching success, we need to jump to the other side of the academic fence, to ascertain the challenges in helping graduates become more successful. Some of these challenges are fairly easy to fix, while others will require change.
Great Expectations. No matter how many students I talk to, they always seem to have high expectations for the assignments. The biggest advantage we have seems to be the highest pass marks for assignments. When I ask about what company the assignment is going to be on or how they are positioned to take advantage of the information, I usually get a blank stare and the response "I don't know." This is a problem. It implies you have students with an undecided company. CIM will not provide that for them. It will give them ideas but the students will need lots of help to get one company and turn it into a winning assignment.
Transformation. The new Chartered Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing according to me, is a "transformative qualification." Students walk in with one idea of how their CIM will go and graduate with a different idea. As most of our experienced professionals know, changing direction takes time. CIM students need to be focusing their efforts on learning about their chosen area, building their knowledge network; contributing to their field and lining up their next assignment .All of this could take up the two years required for getting the CIM qualification.
Student Support. Students also don't realize that some colleges don't have staff to support assignments, most of the time the lecturers are working or staff members do not have the know how to support a variety of assignments ranging from 4000 words to 8000 words. At the same time, The Knowledge Factory has to cater to both the full time students and the working students that come to Knowledge Factory in search of assignment success. It's almost impossible to juggle all of this, at TKF we have full time support staff to guide our students as often as they like.
There are some centres that have outsourced consultants to help their students gain assignment success, giving students the one on one attention they need, however this hardly works due to the consultant being not held accountable.
At Knowledge Factory we have experts to show students how to perform a search for available information. With the Internet changing so rapidly, this is an important part of a professional approach.
Knowledge Networking. I don't have to talk about how important networking is to one's assignment. Many students and graduates don't seem to grasp the importance of this activity. At Knowledge Factory we show the value of such skills. Business today is heavily reliant upon social skills, since we've been embraced by a global market. Technical skills (i.e. what it takes to do your job) are not as critical as they once were. They have given way, ever so slightly, to those who have the ability to communicate effectively across cultural, race and gender barriers.
At Knowledge Factory we use Facebook and all the other sites to share critical global information with our students, it is unlikely that students possess enough business contacts to find specific information before they hit the company website or even create an opportunity from scratch. Nor do they have the skill sets or time to create such networks. At Knowledge Factory we find creative ways to teach students on how to be self-sufficient.
Coaching students and graduates is challenging. Students dedicate the years to learning specific skills that make them valuable to the job market. If the market doesn't recognize that value, then they are in trouble. The CIM new syllabus is a NVQ level seven qualification which is equivalent to an MBA. At the Knowledge Factory we coach our students on how to communicate that value, who to communicate it to, where to communicate it, or even when to communicate (e.g. long before you graduate).
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