The purpose of the Application Paper is to allow you an opportunity to (a) reflect upon what you have learned in this course, (b) consider how you will apply what you have learned to your career development, and (c) evaluate how what you have learned could improve your organization’s (current or future) talent management strategy and practices. This assignment will allow you to describe how several of the important concepts, principles, frameworks, and findings from this course apply to your career and professional development. The paper is designed as an application paper so that you can discuss and apply any of the TM tools and resources from our course to your career and to your organization. As part of your review and analysis, you are strongly encouraged to consider any course content (frameworks, tools, practices, policies, etc.) that are potentially applicable for your career development and/or your organization. This paper should be written with your current situation in mind and looking to your immediate future (within 12 months or just beyond graduation) rather than applying the course’s concepts retrospectively to a past situation.
Paper Guidelines
You may structure your paper according to the following questions: (a) What are the most important concepts, principles, and/or frameworks that you learned during this course (b) Which of these concepts, principles, and/or frameworks are most relevant for your current career goals? (c) What content from this course has made an impact on you professionally over the past 10 weeks? and (d) how will you approach professional situations and challenges differently as a result of learning from this course?
As you answer these questions, please be as specific as possible. Write specifically about how you would apply a certain concept, principle, framework, or key finding to a specific situation or organizational context. You are encouraged to discuss any aspect of the course—readings, class discussions, guest speakers, videos, presentations, exercises, and so on.
The important grading criteria for this paper (summarized below) include application and specificity. Your success in this paper will depend not only on how well you demonstrate an understanding of concepts, principles, and frameworks but also on how well you can apply them to your current and/or future career context and real-world situations.
The writing guidelines for the final paper are as follows:
o Typed, double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font
o APA style citations and references
o Approximately 8–10 pages in length (excluding cover page, references, appendices,
etc.).
Requirements: 8-10 pages
Answer preview
Another key lesson from this course was the link between Porter’s competitive business strategies and TM. As mentioned earlier, gaining a competitive advantage within an organization’s marketplace is critical, considering doing so allows an organization to increase its short-term profitability and long-term financial viability and sustainability. Porter came up with a couple of strategies a business can adopt to gain a competitive advantage. One such strategy is cost leadership. It revolves around the reduction of production costs while still charging consumers’ industry average prices or increasing its market share by lowering the prices of its products (Tanwar, 2013). Once this happens, an organization’s profits will increase.
