Pitching

 In our lecture we learnt about pitching and how to create a successful pitch ready for our future careers! Pitching is one of the most important aspects of a job because in order to get your ideas heard and produced you need to sell it to a potential buyer/producer.

When doing a pitch the whole idea is to try and sell the goal you're trying to achieve with your product/idea, and also attain the goals of the person you're pitching too as they're not going to go for a idea unless its something they're looking for. As pitching is used so frequently audiences often get tired of listening to a long speech about reasons why they need to have this new product/idea, so a innovative way of engaging the audience is through using a 'hook'. Something to catch their attention right at the beginning so they truly listen to the points you're trying to make. Also, by using the technique of storytelling you can make a pitch interesting and giving the audience something to be involved with and curious about, storytelling is also fun for the person pitching as it allows you to express more of your personality. 

Structuring your pitch is key as it allows you to create clarity to your audience about what you are pitching. People take different approaches whether you're more formal about it or take more of a personal approach, it all depends on the type of pitch and who the audience would feel more engaged with. As pitching depends on your audiences demographic researching into what keeps their attention will aid you with your pitch since you can directly target what they'd want.

Finally, as l spoke at the beginning about the hook, the ending of a pitch is just as important as you can have a chance to talk about a plan for the future and how you predict your product/idea fitting in 5 years from now and the impact it'll have. Like the end of all pitches you want to leave room for enigma, leaving your audience curious, excited and willing to do further research and ask questions at the end of your pitch. 

Research Methods

In our lecture we looked at research methods and how you could collect information, whether it be primary or secondary. By using methodology to collect information you can be exact in what you want to find out, for example a focus group can help a researcher gain feedback on a idea or existing product. However, when considering what type of research method you want to use you need to consider the pros and cons of each, for example a covert observation may work for a social experiment however could also be considered unethical. Ethics is a topic that should heavily be considered when doing research as a researcher doesn't want to harm the participants as this could have negative impacts on the results of the research but also a researchers reputation.

We also learnt the difference between quantitate and qualitative research as well as primary and secondary research.

• Quantitative data; This is data that is collected through speech/written answers, it's non-numerical data. Information you'd collect through focus groups, spoken interviews. etc
• Quantitative data; Any data that is numerical/statistics, the benefits of this is you can easily transfer this into something like a pie chart to be visually representative of the data. 
• Primary Research; Any new data that you collect yourself first hand. The benefits of this is you can research into any area and go to the level of depth you need for your research. 
• Secondary Research; This is where you do research and look at data that already exists, so you can gather research from previous studies etc. This research is usually easily accessible from online so is easily accessible. 

To exemplify primary research, we conducted a focus group within our class (qualitative data) and asked questions on a the subject of brushing teeth! As people took part in this focus group we uncovered facts and information about peoples personal lives. However as a audience watching the focus group we noticed some issues, for example when a open discussion was happening within the focus group some people were less inclined to speak, so your sample is important because you want a representative sample but you also want to allocate time evenly to allow everyone to be able to talk and share their thoughts so you 

Personality Test

In this weeks professional skills we discussed about how it's nice to work in groups with people that are like you to you can have consistency in ideas. But we also spoke about how there can be negatives to this and how this can limit your creativity and create clashes between peers. To further our understanding of this we took a personality test and these are my results;

Personality type: The Protagonist

'We are firm believers in people'  and we are drawn to strong personality, and are unafraid to stand up for what they believe in.

Individual traits: Extraverted – 78%, Intuitive – 72%, Feeling – 72%, Judging – 56%, Turbulent – 72%.
Role: Diplomat
Strategy: Social Engagement

Strengths & Weaknesses 
Strengths;
Tolerance, Reliable, Charismatic, Altruistic, Natural leaders.
Weaknesses;
Overall idealistic, too selfless, too sensitive, fluctuating elf esteem.

Career

When it comes to careers' we approach people warmly and sociable as we take a genuine interest in other people. Having these traits mean that we often go into work like counselling and tendency to be “that person who knows everybody”, can be adapted to quite a range of other careers, making career opportunities broad. We tend to go for careers that help the community and have a level or organisation to keep things running smoothly.  However any careers such as emergency services or military, anything that causes us to burn out quickly aren't practical because we aren't good in pressured physical surroundings. 

Professional Skills; Week 1

In the professional skills session we went over skills that can determine the professionalism of someone, these can be contrasting skills like having good/bad presentation of ones self, to unprofessional characteristics for example being morally corrupt which would hinder your success at work. In groups we discussed what are the most important factors that makes someone professional, below are some of the most important ones the groups decided on.

Skills Audit; 

Time Management 7/10 
Dedication 7/10
Good work ethic 7/10
Specialised Skills 6/10
Motivation 8/10 
Effective communication 7/10
Responsible ambition 7/10
Focus 8/10
Flexibility 6/10
Competence 7/10
Approachable 8/10
Work well in a team 7/10
Motivated 9/10
Approachability

Some of the more negative skills include being confrontational and arrogance as these can prevent you from obtaining your aspired goals, these can also prevent you from working effectively in a group as if you don't have good social stability you're less likely to produce consistent work.