Academic skills from the X-Mansion

Academic Skills that will assist me in future job prospects are:

Personal Development Planning
Over this last year, and previous years I have been constantly developing my skills and learning new things to help me gain better employment. This not only means developing with practical skills, but also developing my personal skills. E.g. Listening, researching and presentations. Another skill from this is the ability to self evaluate after each assignment. This is a skill that could be beneficial in the work place as I can self evaluate my work and my performance in order to reach my maximum potential.

Attending Lectures
In lectures I have been able to improve my listening skills, as well as the ability to negotiate my points across when I feel the need to disagree with something. I also believe that this can help with being punctual. Having a purpose of being somewhere gives me the feeling that I need to be there on time or early and as it is something I enjoy I have no problems being there.

Seminars/work groups
Working in a group has obviously allowed me to increase my skills with working in a team. I think that I have also developed the ability to discuss points and argue them if necessary. I feel this is beneficial in the work place as there will be team projects that need to be completed. I also feel that employers like to see people coming to the right conclusion through discussing good and bad points and then adapting them. I can show this skill as I am now undertaking a team project.

Oral Presentation
Under the years I have carried out a series of Presentations and I can say that not all have been pleasant experiences. This is a skill that needs to be developed as there will be times when I need to present work to a client.

Written Essays
The biggest skill I can learn through this is creative or academic writing. This can also develop my use of English and improve my spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Maths Statistics
Statistics can be seen as a way of taking research and managing it. We as designers work with statistics all the time, for example what percentage of users work on a Mac? What percentage of the world have FireFox as their default browser? All this will help us create better websites and cater for the larger target audiences.

Another example is the use of Mathematics in some coding which may be developed as a designer. E.g. ActionScripting and JavaScript.

Observations
Creative influences are everywhere and it is what we see that inspires us. An example of this is animation for me. Whenever I see a film that has great animation it inspires me and makes me think that someday I want to release something just as good or better.

Another skill to add on to this would be attention to detail. For designers this, in my opinion, is a biggest skill some one may need in this industry. I believe that if there is an improvement to be made it should be done up until a point that anymore could degrade the quality.

An example of the use of my observational skills are in the competitive analysis's we complete when developing a site and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of both the sites we create and the sites we are in competition with.

Research
As we do not know everything there is a need to research something be it coding for a Flash project, a way to align a website central on a page or even images to use on a site. This has been a bit of slow starting skill for me as sometimes I do not enjoy researching a topic which I have little interest in.

Exams & Revision
Revision helps us remember things which is an important tool to develop. If you can remember something it takes less time to complete a task than it does if you need to research something. Revision can also aid in the process of Presentations. If you revise and prepare for a Presentation then the worries and panic should be decreased.

On the whole my main weakness is Oral Presentation Skills and instead of embracing them I tend to run from them. The main reason for this is probably my lack of confidence in my public speaking.