What skills do you need to become a manager?
Becoming a manager means understanding management, finance, marketing and human resources all at once, so that you can weigh up these different functions within a single decision. This cross-disciplinary understanding is built through training: Excelia Business School's professionalising programmes develop it in line with businesses' real expectations, making it a genuine lever for their graduates' employability.
The areas management covers
Being a manager isn't about overseeing a single function: it's about understanding several areas of the business at the same time, so that you're able to weigh them up against each other whenever a decision affects more than one function at once. Four broad areas therefore form the foundation of a management role:
- finance
- marketing
- human resources
- management itself
In management, training stays general before it specialises: a shared foundation first, then a gradual specialisation, so that the profile being trained keeps an overall view of the business.
The level of qualification then changes what these skills concretely allow you to do. At Excelia Business School, a Bac+5-level management programme prepares you for management roles, then, with experience, for senior leadership roles: responsibilities then broaden towards arbitrating between these areas, as direct execution recedes. To pinpoint exactly where these skills can take you, the careers management gives access to are set out by function and by sector.
Pinpointing exactly where your own profile fits within this range of functions isn't always straightforward: the management careers guidance quiz helps you identify, in just a few questions, which career these skills could lead you to.
How these skills are acquired
A common misconception is that a flair for management is a matter of temperament, that you either have it or you don't. The programmes designed by Excelia Business School show the opposite: these skills can be developed, and they are developed above all in practice, in contact with real business challenges, not solely in the classroom. Our programmes are built on professionalising pathways, designed in line with businesses' real expectations and needs, which represents a concrete added value in terms of employability for their graduates. This approach continues through professional experience built into the programme, whether through an internship or work-study, where the skills learnt in class are immediately put to the test of the real world.
It's this interplay between teaching and experience that gradually builds a managerial stance: one doesn't work without the other. To discover how this approach plays out in practice, Excelia Business School's management programmes set out, for each level, the place of business within the curriculum.