Approaches to improving presentation and other communication skills is the topic of the next Engineering, Business, and Computing (EBC) Division Speaker Series Presentation on Friday, February 20, 2015, at 1 p.m. in room 121 of the Gaige Technology and Business Innovation Building. Mr. Mitch Zimmer, Assistant Professor of Business will present ?Four Decades of Teaching and Applying CAS100.?
When the Bachelor of Science in Business (BSB) Degree at Berks and the other University Colleges was created in the 1990s, the development work relied heavily on focus groups with local employers. One of the needs they saw for our students/their employees was the ability to communicate, and there is no evidence that isn?t still important. The starting point for Effective Speech for all Penn State degrees is CAS100. However, there are many Universities that use different approaches. In addition, there are many corporations that have their own approach to improving presentation and other communication skills. This presentation looks back on some of those approaches over the last forty years, while also asking the questions of how are we doing at Berks and where are communication skills going in the future.
Mitch Zimmer is an Assistant Professor of Business. For eight years he was the Business Program Coordinator at Penn State Berks and that gives him extensive advising experience. Mr. Zimmer brings over 25 years of business, engineering, consulting, and teaching experience to Penn State Berks. His career started at Exxon Research and Engineering as a Project Engineer and has progressed through a series of steps - each one with more business and less engineering emphasis. Mitch teaches management and business courses, including Math 22, which is the entrance-to-major for the business program at Berks. To keep things interesting, he also teaches courses in canoeing and kayaking. Mitch keeps up with business and engineering issues as a market researcher in such areas as acquisition analysis (including due diligence), competitive intelligence, customer image, and market development. Most of these activities are in the chemicals and plastics industries.
The EBC Division Speaker Series features Penn State Berks faculty and visiting experts who conduct research on a wide variety of topics. Topics are of broad and general interest and are accessible to the non-expert.
For more information, contact either of the co-chairs for the EBC Division Speaker Series: Dr. Jui-Chi Huang, Assistant Professor of Economics, [email protected] or Dr. Ada Leung, Assistant Professor of Marketing [email protected].