What can we learn from aircraft disasters in the business world?
The Career Centre participated in the HR Fest in the framework of the Business Fest 2024, where we had the opportunity to listen to professional presentations on today's HR challenges from experts in the labour market. Are you curious about what's on the minds of employers?
Research conducted jointly by McDonald's and Profession.hu has shown that whilst job starters think that there are a high number of expectations towards them, in reality employers have far fewer expectations towards a first-time employee. Among these, the research results highlighted the following:
- professionalism
- interest: be able to ask good questions, maybe even at the interview
- diligence
- reliability
- ability to work effectively in a team, cooperation
This is important information for young people, as it includes competences (skills, attitudes) that cannot be acquired overnight. However, it is definitely possible to work on developing these competences if we focus on them consciously during our studies. This can be helped by the various training and individual counselling sessions offered by the Centre for Career and Student Services.
"Running a business is an extreme sport. It requires preparation, development and perseverance every day. It's how I live and work," said Péter Renfer, CEO of Nordconn, who went one step further and gave a presentation on leadership skills, which are essential to pay attention to if you have leadership ambitions. The presentation highlighted the following two points:
conflict solving: to be able to deal with conflict situations and resolve conflict between others
emotion and rationality: emotions and logical thinking must be balanced in everyday work
Dr. Melinda Zay, coach and psychological safety mentor, highlighted communication as an essential skill for today's successful leaders. As an executive coach, she has gained insight into the challenges and successes of Fortune 500 executives throughout her career, and through this experience, she focused her presentation on the following elements:
- open communication
- constructive debate
- ability to ask questions
Now you must think that communication skills are a bubble without content, which we call key competences for fashion. We would like to refute this assumption with the example presented by the speaker..
Place communication in a context where you might not think it has a prominent role at first. Let us examine the possible causes for aircraft disasters..
- Unclear situation
- Fixation or distraction
- Confusion, misunderstanding
- No one is piloting the aircraft
- No one is looking out the window
- Use of an undocumented procedure
- Violation of rules or minimum standards
- Unresolved discrepancies
- Objectives are not met
- Deviation from standards
- Lack of communication
The combined occurrence of 4-5 of the next 11 elements of the fault chain already leads to an aircraft disaster. Analysing the causes of the disasters that have occurred so far, it was found that the only failure that has been identified in all the cases examined is that of poor communication. This leads to the conclusion that communication is of major importance even in a situation where one would think that a well-functioning piece of machinery and a competent pilot would be enough.
So what can we do to communicate effectively? Dr. Melinda Zay suggested the following 3+1 open communication strategies:
A culture of discussion and open questions (creating an environment where good questions inspire good answers and solutions)
Active and open listening (understanding the other party's point of view)
Vulnerability and Authentic Communication (accepting mistakes and learning from them, sharing personal difficulties to help others deal with similar situations)
Keep it short and prioritise (short and to the point communication, 2 pizza teams = the number of people in a team that can be fed with two pizzas)
So today, professionalism is not enough to be successful in the labour market. It is essential to pay attention to and develop our other skills. And the easiest way to do this is during our university years, with University of Pannonia's Centre for Career and Student Services offering free skills development trainings every semester that would cost hundreds of thousands of forints on the market.
Keep an eye on our upcoming events to make sure you don't miss out on our limited capacity training sessions.
Let's grow together!
Source: Sessions of BUSINESS FEST 2024 – AHOL AZ ÜZLETI ÉLET TALÁLKOZIK