Management and Planning Career Guide

Management is a very vast field and pertains to handling different kinds of business. It includes many kinds of management profiles: human resource management, construction management, financial management, project management, hotel management, distribution channel management, etc. It is the act of bringing together all the available resources-men and machinery to deploy them towards achieving the desired business targets. The basic principles of management remain same across all industry types. This involves the following:

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• Planning- This involves deciding upon a particular project which the company wants to undertake. A lot of detailed research, thinking and analyzing goes into this as choosing the most favorable course of action is very important in a competitive environment. Everything is based on your research. If the research is exhaustive and detailed, all the pieces will fit. This research can be based on already available primary data. If this data is not available, then you need to start from scratch by collecting first-hand data. Information like market trends, consumer behavior (in terms of their choice, preference), competitor's strategy, new products in the market, etc. can come handy in such research.
• Organizing- Once all the data is collected and all the details have been studied, you proceed to use that information to your benefit. Options are tabled and the best of them is selected. A favorable development plan is charted out, budget is allocated, targets for each quarter (or day/ week) are set and expected returns are predicted.
• Staffing- Then comes the staffing stage where job vacancy ads are placed in various newspapers and on different websites inviting applications for various posts. The short-listed candidates are called for interview with the HR manger who selects the employees and judging them by their specific skill sets and attitude, assigns them related job posts. A careful recruitment and appropriate job division helps in the smooth running of the entire process.
• Leading- The managers from various departments like production, marketing and sales ensure proper work flow in their respective departments and compliment it with the other department's work flow thus ensuring a hand-in-glove kind of overall development. For this, the manager should possess good leadership skills.
• Controlling- Once the project is in its running stage, the flow of demand and production is to be matched. Also the quality needs to be checked and controlled. The managers need to control the working of their respective departments.

Management's ultimate goal is to provide profitable returns to the stakeholders, produce useful products or services for the customers and ensure the interests of the employees. In large scale industries, multiple managers are required in different departments to look over the progress and ensure that the entire process moves forward without any hick-ups. And if at all any such problem occurs, they are there to handle it.

Managers are required not only in big companies but also in other fields like hospitals where we have administrators looking into the running of the hospital. Also, politicians appoint campaign managers for their election campaigns to promote their agendas and help them in winning votes.

Qualifications for the post of manager

• A manager has to be high school pass-out, a graduate in any stream and compulsorily a post-graduate in management with an MBA degree
• He should possess good inter-personal skills
• He needs to be good at English and possess necessary computer skills
• A manager should have a power base and establish good connections with useful people
• Being the head of a department, he needs to possess conceptual skills to analyze a situation and solve the problem
• He should be able to predict and visualize the most probable future outcome. Accordingly he must choose the plan of action

While the field of management is very vast, following is a list of various managerial posts where the above mentioned universal set of skills can be applied to derive useful results.