Strategy development managers are highly experienced professionals who have an active role in decision making at the highest level. They often work closely with a firm’s top management and C-suite executives. The core job responsibilities of a strategy development manager involves identifying the business opportunities, tracking operational effectiveness, identifying the weakness and strengths of the business in a global market environment. In this coveted job position, the role-holder needs to make recommendations on minimizing business risks, and bettering existing business plans to ensure long-term business growth.

3 Simple Steps to Becoming a Business Strategy Manager

Here’s a brief and compact guide to preparing for the said role:

Step 1: Get an Undergraduate Degree in Business Management

As and when you graduate from high school, the first step you can take towards reaching your goal is enrolling into a bachelor’s degree program that pertains to business studies. While there exist many dedicated strategic management degree courses at the university/college level, but it would be better to opt for a fundamental major. Choose your majors wisely by keeping in mind the end career goals. And hence, it would be much easier for you to succeed, when you have choose a subject discipline like these as a major – finance, economics, management, or business administration.

Step 2: Gain Some Work Experience Right After Undergraduation

After you complete your bachelor’s degree program, you need to look for professional work opportunities so as to gain some relevant experience, before enrolling in a master’s degree program. However, it’s not a mandate to have any sort of work experience before applying for a graduate program in business strategy or management, but an early work experience is considered the best form of practical learning that exists.

With a couple of years of experience under your belt, you gain much confidence, and are fully prepared for breaking into a master’s program. Further, this experience will set a strong foundation for your post-graduation job roles of the future.

Step 3: Get an MBA

A master’s degree in business management would certainly help in your prospective career, especially in making you rise to the position of a strategy framework manager, fast. An MBA would offer higher-level learning of the fundamentals of economics, business management, and finance. It would eventually help you to be considered for management roles, instead of starting from the bottom, i.e. entry-level roles. On top of an MBA degree, one can earn multiple business certifications that help significantly enhance your monetary value for recruiters and hiring managers.

Strategy Leader’s Job Duties

Here are a few of the common day-to-day work responsibilities of a business strategy manager:

  • Drafting and constantly modifying the organizational business strategy, as per the ongoing market conditions.
  • Analysing and tracking progress of operational efficiency, process flow, and managing stakeholders’ interests.
  • Keeping a constant eye on the changing market trends, and the immediate competitors.
  • Determining new business opportunities, and potential threats.
  • Aligning processes, departmental goals, and resource deployment with the firm’s business strategy.
  • Planning, managing, and executing proposed projects and recommendations.
  • Contributing to C-level executives’ decision-making process.
  • Leading firm’s internal teams and motivating them to execute and attain the ultimate business goals.
  • Distributing workload among varied teams within the organization, and overseeing the daily work progress.
  • Offer assistance on multiple business fronts – performance evaluation, employee recruitment, retention, training, and termination, among others.
  • Identifying gaps in business strategy blueprints and taking corrective actions.

We hope, after having read this article, you, as an aspirant, must have learned something useful, in terms of preparing for your prospective career as a strategy manager. We would recommend that on top of the conventional learning routes, do consider acquiring the modern role-specific certifications that help teach you the niche skills that fall under the big umbrella of business management.