Hi, everyone and especially Ms @holt, I hope for some feedback for this essay. Actually I feel a bit confused how write it. So, I would love to hear some feedback to revise mine better. Thank you.
chevening application essay
Chevening is looking for individuals with strong professional relationship-building skills, who will engage with the Chevening community and influence and lead others in their chosen profession. Please explain how you build and maintain relationships in a professional capacity, using clear examples of how you currently do this, and outline how you hope to use these skills in the future.
In professional life, I built a friendly, respectful and professional relationship. I build and maintain those relationships with good communication, more respect to older co-workers, more compassion to younger co-workers and I put manners and empathy as priority. I learn all of it from soft skills seminars, organization and committee experiences. Besides that, my previous experience as tutor and laboratory assistant in my university led me to be someone who really loves to share and discuss, and I applied it in my work life.
At my previous job, I had to work with some drafters for different projects in one month and all of them came from different backgrounds. Mostly every day, I take a break from my main job as a structural engineer for about 15 to 30 minutes to visit the drafters one by one, even though they are not working with me on one project. During that time, I asked about their progress and what is something that I can help with. Some of them consult about their drawings and I would listen first about their drawing ideas and then give some feedback, and some asked me to discuss the structural design in their projects. At this moment, I learn about their behaviours, especially when they have a problem. Approaching them first is my way to check them and I would open communication whether it is a work problem or personal problem. When there is a problem that I found myself not sure about, I would ask our project manager to join us in discussion. Out of work, sometimes we go out together as friends and sometimes our project manager joins us for food together.
My current job has a different situation because some of my co-workers are at site construction. Building effective communication with co-worker who work on site is not easy, because mostly communication by phone. My solution to maintain communication in this situation is to keep the manner whether it is a message or a call and keep emotional management. When there is a major problem to solve, I would visit the site and discuss it with the chief of workers. Sometimes conflict between site workers and the purchasing team could happen. For example, there is an additional need for material in the project and the purchasing team asked why and the site supervisor did not explain it well. I would become a mediator at this moment. I communicated with the supervisor first and listened to their explanation, then I explained it to purchasing staff comprehensively. In my work situation now, I built more friendly relationships with people in the head office and more professional with the site workers.
Developing effective communication and the ability to observe the dynamic situation at work lead me to build some network with colleagues. And I hope using those skills will be highly beneficial when I get the opportunity to be a part of the Chevening Program and to achieve my goals to build my own consulting start-up.