Abstract:

Oral communication skills are widely accepted as vital graduate competencies. However, when compared with public speaking, formal meetings have received much less attention (Daff, 2013). This is despite the greater prevalence of such unplanned oral communication in the business world (Abrahams, 2017) and the apprehension formal meetings appear to evoke. This paper presents the use of a business meeting role-play simulation with a group of first-year undergraduate Accounting and Finance students at a university in England. The activity aims to provide opportunities to discuss and solve conflicts in a mock business environment, followed by reflection with reference to graduate competencies. The paper explains how the approach was developed, determines the competencies on which students chose to reflect and analyses the reasons given for choosing the most common competencies. The analysis shows that the competencies chosen by students for reflection generally align with the aims of the task; ‘Influencing’, ‘Teamwork’ and ‘Listening’ together account for over half of the reflections written. While students are urged to focus on their own progress when deciding which competencies to select, the evidence shows the majority base their selection on the importance of the competency to the task. Despite the apparent importance of 'Tolerance of Stress' to formal meetings, this competency was selected for reflection by only a few students.

Keywords:

Role-play, simulation, oral communication, formal meetings, competencies, reflection.