They obviously require the skill set specific to the roles they have, but in addition to those more targeted skills, they also need to possess a collection of more general abilities that are necessary for nearly every office job under the artificial fluorescent sun.
These general business capabilities have developed over the years: typing matters less today than it once did (computer keyboards have made it much easier to go back and fix mistakes), shorthand matters not all, but being able to write a coherent email that won’t embarrass you in the eyes of your superiors is now of immense importance. Excel didn’t exist in the age of the typewriter, but now it’s being used by office workers in capacities that weren’t dreamt of in Microsoft’s philosophy. Project management didn’t used to be an entire profession and quasi-science that trickled down to everyone involved in a business project, and there was no PowerPoint to back up presentations, which were very likely fewer in the offices of yore. Finally, although soft skills such as time management, conflict resolution, and effective communication always existed, they weren’t looked upon as a semi-cohesive whole that could, and needed to be, taught.
People working in business today need these skills, and others like them, if they’re to operate successfully in an office environment. If you’re training for a new career, you shouldn’t neglect basic business abilities as you study coding, data science, accounting, or whatever subjects you need to launch yourself into your chosen new field of endeavor. Look at it this way: without them, your resume is going to be the laser-printed equivalent of a Boston Cooler made with Canada Dry ginger ale.
Best Business Classes & Schools in Detroit
Perhaps the most critically important of basic business skills today is the ability to write good business English. You don’t have to be able to spin out a whole novel or a doctoral dissertation, but even in an entry-level position, you’re going to be writing and answering emails all day long. If your digital correspondence is littered with “their” and “there” where there should be “they’re, ” you’re going to have trouble being taken seriously.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of business writing classes that can come to your rescue. NYC Career Centers offers two such courses, each lasting a day. Effective Business Writing, which teaches everything from how to write thank-you notes to those dreaded bad-news memos, and Advanced Business Writing, which goes more deeply into the mechanics of writing, determining what your intended message is, and tailoring it to any given audience. If you want a more in-depth class, you might consider Gotham Writers Workshop’s self-paced six-week Business Writing Level 1 or its two-week Grammar 1: The Basics, if you think you need to go back to square one when it comes to writing in this impossible language of ours.
Other business skills that will be invaluable to you in almost any role include having an understanding of the complex field of project management. To that end, NYC Career Centers offers Project Management Level 1, which teaches students the five phases of project management and how they are applied. Another fundamental skill is PowerPoint, the software that guides presentations and makes them a little less boring. New York City school Noble Desktop has a PowerPoint in a Day class that does indeed last a day, and will give you the ability to assemble presentations that might actually engage your audience.
Of course, you need more than a good slideshow to ace a presentation. You also need to put it across, and not everyone is a born public speaker. Indeed, many people are terrified of speaking in front of a group of people, which is why Zenspeak has a ten-session class entitled Overcome. Your Public Speaking Fear that gradually gets you over your glossophobia (apologies to those who suffer from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia for the big word.) Something briefer is available through Improving Communications: Introduction to Public Speaking, a four-hour workshop that will get you started on the path to impressing and persuading an audience without having to imagine the audience dressed in its underwear.
These classes are all available online, whither most training of these types have migrated over the past few years. With the exception of the one asynchronous business writing class listed above, which affords you complete freedom in terms of when and where you study, the other classes listed above are all of the live online variety, meaning that the class takes place at a given point in time in which your teacher is available for questions, exactly as if you were attending a brick-and-mortar school. On the other hand, you’re free to follow the class from anywhere you like. That can mean a quiet place in your home, your office, or in the Detroit Shipping Company’s -320° Coffee & Creamery, where you’ll find plenty of wifi, outlets, room to work, and ice cream flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen.
Detroit Industries That Use Business
Fundamental business skills are valuable in just about any professional setting. No matter where you’re working and what your company does, being able to write coherent emails and speak in public will always be worthwhile arrows to have in your professional quiver. These are skills that will even prove handy even outside of a strictly business context. You can embark on this phase of your education sure of the fact that your money is not going to be wasted learning something you don’t need.
There’s a great deal more to Detroit’s economy than automobile assembly lines: 7.8% of the workforce engages in STEM occupations, a number that exceeds the national average, and Michigan led the country in venture capital investment growth in the five years leading to 2021. That makes for a lot of workplace scenarios in which basic business skills regularly play a prominent role.
Business Jobs & Salaries in Detroit
Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) gathered by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that 1,866,500 people were employed in the Detroit/Warren/Dearborn metropolitan area in 2022. Of those, 225,000 were employed in the office and administrative support sector, earning a mean salary of roughly $46,000 per annum. Given Detroit’s position in the world’s automotive industry, there is nothing surprising in the fact that production should be the next busiest sector, and, admittedly, it’s a field in which business skills are less important than they are for office workers. A few lines below are business and financial services occupations, in which 126,000 people are involved in a sector for which business skills are absolutely mandatory. The mean annual salary for such workers is approximately $87,000.
Other fields that require sharp business skills in the OEWS report include management occupations (124,000 people employed; mean salary of roughly $128,000), computer and mathematical occupations (66,600 employed; $97,000 mean salary), and the large rubric of arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations (23,500 positions; $64,000 mean salary.) From those numbers, you can deduce that nearly one in every three jobs in Detroit requires the types of business skills under discussion here. You’ll have to look far and wide to come up with another set of workplace skills that can be applied so broadly.