The best way to make students prepared for corporate relations is student leadership.
Here are five advantages of educational strategies that are aimed at student leadership:
1. Boosting Leadership Skills
It is not enough for a student to decide that they want to be a leader. The making of a good leader is not something that is inherited. Students have to work compulsively on their leadership skills.
Course training such skills should be graded.
A student should master the fundamental aspects, such as:
Communication skills
Decision-making skills
Organizing skills
Action planning
Strategic thinking
Risk management
The basics of these aspects can be learned to a certain extent by students of any age. They just would need some relevant studying material in accordance with their needs.
Once there is a solid foundation, students should be taught something new. The latest tendencies inspire us to search for something in various leadership styles that can make a difference.
Among others, Forbes researchers enumerate such modern leadership skills as:
Resiliency
Culture management
Multi-generational management
Collaboration
Emotional intelligence
These skills are as important for the students’ future as the knowledge they get in the classroom like persuasion, and cause effect essay writing and note-taking.
2. Team Building
One of the main goals of student leadership is team building. Of course, there are classes, groups, and friends. They all boost a student’s ability to work as part of a team.
However, student leadership gives people much more than that. Being a part of a team is very important. You have a role to fulfill.
Most of the time, you’ve been told what to do, and you know your responsibility is to do it right. It is great to be creative and full of initiative. However, the only one you are really in charge of is your own self.
Leadership requires more. Besides the leadership skills we have listed above, a good leader is to be able to see the strengths and weaknesses of each team member.
Moreover, it is important to make the strengths work for the whole team.
3. Bringing a Unique Experience
It is a fact that leaders among students later become leaders at a workplace more often than those who have no prior leadership experience.
This is because it is easier for them to take responsibility for other people, and they already know how to make a team work.
Another side of student leadership experience is that it may be harder than leading others after graduation. If teens don’t always see the authorities in adults, why would they listen to someone their age?
On one hand, a student leader has more support from faculty members. But this doesn’t mean they will automatically have the support of other students.
The only difference is that the student leader gets a chance to practice it right now, while team members benefit from it later in life.
4. Inspiring Networking
One of the misconceptions about relationships is that they should be natural. Yes, friendship and romance should be spontaneous and unforced. But other connections that people like to call useful are different.
Team building and student leadership at college or university show students how to build such connections. Leaders get to know a lot of people, including teachers, faculty, and heads of student clubs and organizations.
They have to be able to introduce team members to all these people. Moreover, leaders often delegate some connections to team members, which is an advantageous experience too.
5. Setting Role Models
As we have mentioned above, it is hard for student leaders to get respected by their peers. But if they do, they become much more important role models for other students than adults. Generally, teenagers don’t tend to like adult authority, so a leader of their age often becomes an example to follow.
If the school chooses a leader (or better, lets the students choose one), this is a great alternative to those who gained power by force.
Have you noticed that many young employees, as clever and trained as they are, simply can’t lead other people? One may say that the reason for this is that nobody wants to be led by a young, inexperienced person.
While the actual age doesn’t matter, the lack of experience is a real problem.
However, with the help of student leadership, this problem can be solved long before young professionals start working.
-By Kevin Nelson