3 Ways to Develop Strategic Planning Skills from an Internship

There are many ways to develop the ability to plan strategically when working for a multinational or as a global leader in various kinds of organizations. But here are the top five ways to develop these skills from a semester's worth of working for a multinational organization.

1. Always Ask How

When first introduced to new processes or new projects always consider asking how something works. The best way to develop your ability to plan strategically is to constantly learn how to better understand situations and adapt to them. This is a skill that can be easily developed within an internship, no matter the industry, as it exposes you to encounter different situations with different solutions and various variables that will test your resolve and ability to ask how to carry a task to completion.

2. Understand People

There are many ways that one can communicate with people and build great relationships, but it is the way that we understand those people that helps us in building good strategic plans collectively. To be a successful strategic planner one must understand the people they work with to function as a unit and carry out the plans and logistics accordingly. The only way to do this is by understanding the biases, the opinions, perspectives, and backgrounds from which others come from. This makes for a global professional that knows what works best with different people to make generate a successful strategic plan. These are the things that you should always be looking out for when working in a professional setting such as in an internship.

3. Know the Ends to Figure out the Means

When in a professional setting such as an internship it is crucial that one understands the end goal and where it is that you want to get to then understand what strategic plan will provide you the steps and/or the method to get there. Often times professionals believe that by understanding the steps and following them logically one can achieve their end goal, when it is really the reverse. Working or interning helps you gain this understanding of the way that strategic planning works by demonstrating how it is far more efficient and easier to understand and know the end goal first before setting up the steps and path to take to achieve it.

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