February 18, 2017
I am the Chair of the APICS West Coast student case competition, and we just wrapped up our 2017 event. We had 104 students from around the world fly into San Diego to compete. It was a really impressive group of students!
The competition is judged 50% on the technical score (the return on investment achieved after several rounds running a business simulation game) and 50% on the presentation to the Boards of Directors of the company. I have to say….some of the best presentations were those who didn’t perform as well on the ROI because they learned from it, took the positive attitude and used a creative mindset to show how they would improve in the future. With that said, just as is true in real life, you MUST have both the technical side (no empty suits can be successful long-term) AND the communications to back it up.
The team that won not only 1st place in the undergraduate division but ALSO was the top scoring team of undergraduates and graduates and so will represent us at APICS Conference was Harvey Mudd College. Although I’m the chair of the competition and excited about how amazing EVERY team performed at the event, I am especially thrilled because Harvey Mudd is an APICS Inland Empire Chapter student team. CONGRATS Alexa Le, Joe Sinopoli, Shaan Gareeb and Katherine (Yoo Jeong) Shim! (And Kash Gokli, your academic advisor)
One tip to implement this week:
Take what these students did to heart and think about how you can continually improve your technical skills AND your communication/ presentation skills. I find that my clients often think about investing in technical skills but rarely think about communication and presentation skills yet one without the other doesn’t work.
Deliberately sketch out a plan. Select 1 technical skill and 1 communication skill you’d like to improve. Even if you have a long list (we all do!), just select one in each category that you think will be especially beneficial to your career in the next year. My clients find that if they select intelligently and FOCUS in execution, they succeed. Let me know how it goes.