Personal and Professional Development for Business Students

This book is unique in the areas of personal development, employability and responsibility in business. First, it brings all these areas together in a coherent and rigorous fashion.  Second, it recognises what is needed for the Twenty-First Century business student in an environment, which demands both integrated thinking and integrity.  Third, it is focused in practice, recognising the different functional areas and outlining what responsibility looks like in each of these.  Fourth, it acts as a credible means of integrating the business curriculum by embedding personal development in each of the professional areas.
The book is for students, academics and practitioners, setting up a dialogue that will enable the most effective career development.

The first thing I really love about Paul Dowson’s hugely comprehensive Personal and Professional Development for Business Students is its clarity; he takes complex themes and turns them into accessible learning outcomes for students and academics.  The other thing to love about this book is its humanity – it is  insightful and borne of a deep concern about how students transition from higher education to working life and citizenship.

Paul Dowson’s Personal and Professional Development for Business Students clearly approaches the ‘21st century skills-issue’ and stresses the importance of personal development in relation to higher education in a fast changing globalizing employment market. Hands-on, reflective, thorough: this book is already a definite must-have both for HE institutions professionals and students.

This is a thought-provoking invitation to students engaged in the management of their careers.  It steps way outside the tired banalities of what is called 'career guidance'.  And that means facing career-management issues ranging from the personal to the planetary.  The author invites students into a process of critical and self-critical engagement with the issues.  Some of these are moral and ethical.  The material points to the uses of narrative in making sense of the resulting complexity.  All of this moves into territory deeper and wider than what are recited as economic, psychological and political 'facts'.  The inclusion of episodes from the author's experience help to draw each student into her or his own experience not just for its functionality but also for its humanity.

"Paul Dowson's encouraging book connects depth of thought and analysis with a clear perception and an empathic understanding of the needs which students and graduates have in their search to find their career and their position in life. The ways introduced and explored open up practical steps and perspectives during higher education which will be truly empowering. The text is making clear that there is common ground between the author and the reader in the latter’s struggle for a position of responsibility in business and human existence. I assume this fresh pragmatic and at the same time deep approach will inspire students' career development and debates on the subject among academics and professionals in the UK and on the Continent likewise."

Personal and Professional Development for Business Students makes accessible to the student reader a wealth of scholarly riches, setting employability in a wider critical context, that of the development of the ethical and integrated self. Packed with fresh perspectives and through provoking concepts and practical ideas, the book grapples with the challenges of how to become an employable professional in the protean world of post modernity. While refusing simplistic conclusions and naive optimism, the book provides ample grounds for a belief in the lasting benefits that come from intellectual enlightenment and reflective learning.

In this wonderful book, Paul Dowson presents an excellent and accessible overview of theories on identity development. It offers a wealth of theoretical information and practical exercises, aiming at the integration in business of the personal, the moral and the organizational level. It will be a great help to business students in becoming competent, authentic and responsible professionals.