Continuing your higher education path is a worthy endeavor. Getting a degree that can enhance your current work or help you find another career path. Management and related fields all benefit from acquiring a degree and finding ways to continue learning throughout a successful career.
Whether you’re presently working in a management career or aspire to climb the ladder of organizational management, getting a degree in the field might be the right path for you. For example, suppose the prospect of helping others come together and understand how best to work together in pursuit of an organizational goal appeals to you, you’re a problem solver, or you simply aspire to do more. In that case, organizational management is a career path you may want to consider. Here’s a quick guide to what you need to know about getting an organizational degree.
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Organizational Management Defined
There are two definitions of organizational management. One’s quite boring: getting people together to work toward a predetermined goal. The other is much more exciting: Organizational management addresses the human side of managing an organization. A degree program focuses on teaching everything essential to an organization, such as communication, decisiveness, people’s behavior in groups, ethics, and management skills.
Organizational management helps students develop a personalized management style perfectly suited to their role within an organization or any field in which they are interested. For example, managing and leadership skills are certainly a part of organizational management and accounting, human resources management, business law, and strategic management. On the other hand, suppose you have any kind of interest in analyzing social problems (especially as they pertain to the workplace) and how they eventually affect everyone, from workgroups to the entire organization. In that case, organizational management is the right path.
It’s almost a junction of some elements of psychology with the basic tenets of business leadership. To wit, understanding the characteristics of individuals and how their behavior impacts the business is another integral component of the organizational management discipline.
Careers in Organizational Management
So, with such an exciting field ahead of aspiring organizational managers, one may ask the question, “what kind of careers are available in organizational management?” That’s an easy one! At the undergraduate level, you’ll find an assortment of diverse and engaging careers, including small business management, sales, retail management, insurance underwriter, management in tech-related fields, government jobs, payroll management, and many more.
Fantastic jobs open up at the graduate level, such as high-level marketing, advertising, public relations, training, or advanced human resources roles at larger companies.
Get a Degree Online
While traditional colleges may offer such degrees, attending an online college is probably the easiest, most convenient option. After all, you’re busy. You may already be working a day job in one field, preparing to transition into another one. Or perhaps you’re pursuing a secondary (or tertiary) bachelor’s degree to learn new things and get ahead at your organization. Getting an organizational management degree online is the quickest, most efficient way to embark on the journey to getting started with a career in organizational management. Start by searching for accredited schools that offer accelerated degrees you can get online fast.
Accreditation is a mark of quality and means a particular school typically does a good job of educating its students and imparting the necessary skills to succeed in their later careers. However, it isn’t a guarantee of success; it simply means the school is equipped to impart adequate knowledge and skills to prepare graduates for possible success.
Diligently avoid diploma mills—“schools” that sell degrees for cash payments, have no actual courses, and are often located in different countries—when you’re searching for an online college, and be sure to meticulously research the school’s reputation, admission requirements, and financial aid opportunities.
Organizational Management Skills
Organizational management requires a vast assortment of skills, most of which you’ll learn and develop throughout your studies. Part of it comes down to understanding organizational management styles, specifically autocratic, democratic, and walking-around working styles.
The autocratic work style is more rigid than one might expect on the surface. In this style, managers don’t consider employees’ ideas or suggestions and are solely responsible for running the company. As a result, employees always have to wait for management to tell them what to do and don’t have any say in what happens. This can be detrimental to the employees and create motivation issues.
One of the key missions of an organizational manager lies: to study this style and behavior and change it to something that works better toward the organization’s goal. The democratic work style is almost the complete opposite. Leaders listen to employees in this mode of operation, and there’s more communication in the office.
Organizational leadership lends itself well to this style. Finally, the “walking around” work style is where managers wall around interacting with employees more often, mentoring them one-on-one, and guiding them as needed. Rather than micro-managing, the idea here is to find out what’s happening in the organization around them and lead to extremely effective management. Organizational managers tend to thrive in these two styles. Other useful skills in organizational management include:
- Planning
- Analysis
- Team building
- Staffing
- Organizational skills
- Leadership
- Control
- Time management
- Motivation
- Understanding
Ultimately, organizational management is a varied degree path with great potential for growth and skill-building for a long time to come.
Continuing Education
Curiosity and continuing to learn are key ingredients to any recipe for success. So if you’re satisfied with your organizational management degree and current career but want to take things to the next level, continuing education is the way to go.
While a BA in organizational management can get you started with an amazing career, a Master of Arts (MA) can significantly bolster your career. An MA program takes everything you learned on the BA program and helps you develop advanced skills as they relate to running and understanding an organization.
There’s typically a reinforcement of ethics training with more focus on strategic planning. So, if you’re ready to become a more effective leader, organizational management is a worthy field to accomplish that goal. Plus, it never hurts to keep learning new things.
Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
