Management skills are the most essential thing for developing management. There are three sources of management skills which are described below in detail:
- Education
- Training and
- Experience.
Some managers draw largely from one source or the other, whereas others rely on a combination of the three.
Education (one of the sources of management skills)
The principal advantage of education as a source of management skills is a student can follow a well-developed program of study, thereby becoming familiar with current research and thinking on management.
Moreover, most college and university students can fully devote their time, every, and attention to learning. They can acquire management skills in an academic setting.
In developed as well as developing countries, the number of enrollments in business schools and colleges has tremendously risen in recent years.
More and more bright students are seeking degrees in management and administration. B.B.A. M.B.A. programs of universities, colleges, and institutes have also been experiencing rapid growth, and they often attract students from diverse fields.
Moreover, the current trend is clearly towards formal education as a pre-requisite to business success. Non-business graduates, like engineers, architects, and so on have recently begun to take more and more business courses in an effort to enhance their job opportunities.
Even though they have degrees in management, yet most of them have not stopped their academic education in management. Many of them periodically return to the campus to participate in management development programs.
Lower-and mid-level managers also take advantage of programs offered by open universities under the distance mode.
The most recent innovation in extended management education is the Executive MBA program offered by business schools and institutes of business administration. Under this system, middle and top managers enroll accelerated programs of study on weekends.
In Bangladesh, as in most developing countries, most managers in the 70s or even in the 80s were without any degree, let alone a management degree.
The most modern developments in information and computer technology, communication, etc. have made them redundant as managers.
Thus today’s employers are very careful in employing only properly educated people in managerial positions with the advancement of modern technology, management requires highly qualified managers.
Hence, the number of management students is increasing fast, and a great many of them are currently employed, executives.
Experience as a source of management skills
Management education may be too general to make a manager successful in a specific field and herein comes the importance of experience as a source of management skill. In fact, for a variety of reasons, experience has no alternative for success in many managerial positions.
Thus many managers get to the top because of their rich resources of experience in other jobs. BY experiencing the day-to-day pressures and by meeting a variety of managerial challenges, a manager develops insights that cannot be learned from a book. His hands-on experience is an invaluable treasure that none can acquire merely by reading books.
Practical experience makes education in management tested and foolproof.
Young and prospective managers can gather experience through a number of ways. Organizationally, they can be systematically assigned to a variety of different jobs. Over time they are exposed to most, if not all, of the major aspects of their organizations.
In this way, managers can perfect their required skills through experience. Both formal and informal training programs also help managers sharpen their job experience.
Training as a source of management skills
It is essential in many organizations that before an employee is fitted into a harmonious working relationship with other employees, he/she is given adequate training. In fact, training is the act of increasing the skill and efficiency of an employee for doing a job.
Training enables an employee to do her/his present job more training may be considered as a planned program designed to improve performance and bring about positive changes in knowledge, skills, attitude, and behavior of employees.
Training provides skills and abilities that may be called on in the future to satisfy the organization’s human resources needs. Training is a job-oriented process and it bridges the gap between job needs and employee skills, knowledge, and behavior.
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