It might seem a little strange to think that an MBA student (and really any business professional) should spend time learning a software package targeted at the graphic design and photography industry. But, for me, knowing how to use Photoshop has provided a significant advantage in both my professional career and in my MBA courses. Let me explain.

As an MBA student, you spend a significant amount of time working on presentations. For me, it has been a regular course requirement to give 1-2 presentations per semester. As a result, I have prepared anywhere from 5-10 presentations since I have started school. And, I probably have seen more than 50 presentations. This amount of exposure has really made me somewhat of a connoisseur of the medium.

Now, I do not plan on going into all aspects of what makes a good presentation, but I will tell you that one of the major aspects is visual interest. I could be listening to a great orator (think Al Gore or Steve Jobs) and if they do not provide compelling visuals to go along with the speech, my mind starts to wander. For me the charts, graphs, and pictures really pull me into the speech and hold my attention.

That is why I think learning Photoshop is important. It provides you with the basic tools necessary to provide visual interest in your presentations. It allows you to edit images (cropping, resizing, distortion) and also create new visual elements (charts, graphs, layouts, etc). I use Photoshop for a number of things—to stylize text, to cut out pictures of people to put next to quotes, to create custom layouts, etc. You can see a lot of these effects in my blogging presentation.

I am far from a graphic designer, but, I have used Photoshop for a number of years. In my experience, it is not too hard to learn the basics. There are a number of courses at local colleges and universities to help get you started. In the St. Louis area, UMSL offers Photoshop courses as part of their Micro-computer program and St. Charles Community college offers courses, as well. You can also start learning online. Adobe’s Video Workshop and Lynda are a good place to start.

While Photoshop skills are not common curriculum for MBA students and other business professionals, I think the skill itself will pay dividends in your course work and future career.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 6:12 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.