Your Guide to DECA Success

My name is Manny Pahwa and I am a grade 10 at Unionville High School. I have had a great passion for DECA since my grade 9 year and am pleased to be providing you guys with some tips as to how to prepare for and do well in DECA. In my grade 9 year, I competed in the Principles of Marketing (PMK) category, and this year I am competing in the Business Finance Series (BFS) category. Most recently I have won 1st place at the York Regional’s competition and won Provincial Champion at the DECA Ontario Provincials 2020 Conference, qualifying to compete at the 2020 International Career Development Conference (ICDC). I will be talking about how I personally prepared for DECA, and how you can prepare in order to make it to, and win at ICDC.

These tips for succeeding in DECA are mainly based for competitors participating in an individual or team oral event but can be applied to written and chapter events as well.

Start Preparing Early

One of the biggest mistakes I have seen people make is starting to prepare weeks or even days before their competition, whether this be regionals or provincials. It is very important to give yourself a good chunk of time (I would recommend a few months) to prepare for competition, as failing to do so will result in a lot of stress closer to the competition, and possibly a bad performance at the competition as well. Giving yourself time allows you to work on all aspects of the competition. In order to make and place at ICDC, most times it is not sufficient to only be good at either roleplays or exams - a good performance in both is required to do well at competition. Another great thing to do is to contact and talk to people who have succeeded in your event in earlier years. These people are often a great resource for competitive tips and how to study and allocate your time well.

Study Hard AND Smart

Another thing that is vital for success in DECA is knowing how to study, when to study and what to study. Many people try very hard in DECA, but don’t succeed because they are simply not putting the effort in the places where it is truly needed. For example, if a BFS competitor spends countless hours learning finance concepts, but does not practice applying these concepts into their case studies, they may find themself struggling in competition. To avoid problems like these, it is very important to have a good balance between studying content, practicing cases and practicing exams. Personally, being in grade 10, I had no financial knowledge coming into BFS. The reason I was able to do well at the competition was because I planned my study schedule in a way that would allow me to learn how to improve in all the areas of DECA. Starting off early, I spent the summer learning all of the fundamental knowledge I needed to know about finance, later starting to do some practice exams. Roughly a month before my regional competition, I started to heavily focus on practicing roleplays and applying the things I had studied into my roleplays. Furthermore, it is important to know what to study in relation to the amount of time left till competition. For example, although it may seem beneficial to start researching industry examples, finding quotes and brainstorming visuals months before competition, all this will really do is give you something else to worry about during the time that you should be spending learning content or practicing exams. Things like quotes that require memorizing should be focused on closer to competition to reduce the chance of forgetting these things and having to restudy, therefore wasting quite a bit of your time.

The next few tips will be more specific to roleplays and exams respectively. They will cover details about how to perform a good case study and how to achieve 90+ on the multiple choice exam (MC).

Perfecting the Roleplay

The roleplay is probably the most important aspect of the competition, especially for individual oral events. Failure to do well on the case study(s) will most likely result in a disappointing outcome at competition, especially at provincial and international levels. The two biggest pieces of advice, no matter the event, I can give to achieve a high score on the roleplay are; 1) Be confident and 2) Relate to the case. Often times, when competitors encounter a difficult or unusual performance indicator (PI), they will become very stressed and worried. The best thing to do in roleplays is to be confident and sell yourself. If there is one PI that you don’t know, if you seem confident in your explanation - even while explaining the PI completely incorrectly - you can end up with a pretty good score. I personally thought that this was one of those pieces of advice that everyone gives because ‘confidence is always good’, so I took it with a grain of salt. Last year however, I realized that this is actually very effective advice. At the 2019 Provincial Competition, I stumbled upon the PI; “Explain the nature of private enterprise” in one of my cases. At the time I had no clue what the PI was about, and I ended up saying the exact opposite of what the PI really meant. However, I sounded confident and I sounded like I knew what I was talking about, which resulted in me getting above 90 on the roleplay. Another thing that many people struggle to do, even at the provincial and international level, is relate to the case. The whole point of roleplays are to act in role as if, for example, you are actually the finance director, at an actual AI company, in an actual meeting with the actual CFO. Saying little things like “It has been a pleasure working with you so far” or “You can always email me or call me for any further information” can really separate you from competitors. Along with this, relating all of your PIs to the actual case will take you from an 11 or 12 to a 13 or 14 on the PI, resulting in a higher overall mark. Simply spitting information and content at the judge will not result in a high mark. This is why it is very important to practice roleplays - to understand what is and isn’t necessary to include in your case study.

Acing the Exam

The multiple choice exam is the most overlooked and ignored factor in DECA. I have lost count of the amount of competitors that I have met, who are amazing at their case studies, but simply not as good at the exams. It is very important to remember that the exam is the only factor that you can truly control. With roleplays, there are always possibilities of things such as judge bias or getting a ‘strict judge’. With exams however, your performance solely depends on your preparation. Therefore it is very important to focus on both the roleplay and the exam. The only best way to study for the exam is just doing all of them repeatedly. This is often the advice given, and some people may find it repetitive, but it is truly the most effective way to study for your MC. At the regional and provincial competitions, exam questions are often repeated from past exams, so becoming familiar with these questions will help you do well. Along with this, reading the solutions to the answers will be very helpful as well. If the question on the exam isn’t the exact same as one you have done before, it is very possible that it is relating to the same general concept, just a different concept within that concept. The solutions provide great explanations to why the correct answer was correct, and why the other answers were incorrect. The combination of doing many MCs repeatedly and reading and understanding the solutions to questions will destine you for a high mark on the multiple choice exam.

Trust Yourself

The final tip I can give is to trust yourself. People will often get intimidated by having a good competitor, or being sectioned with someone very strong. Worrying about things like this will only stress you out and worsen your chances of winning. If you have put in the time and effort into studying and practicing, it will show in the competition, no matter who you are competing against.