GMAT Essays (AWA)

Read the argument and the instructions that follow it, and then make any notes that will help you plan your response. Begin typing your response in the box at the bottom of the screen.

The following appeared in a memorandum from the director of research and development at Ready-to-Ware, a software engineering firm.

The package of benefits and incentives that Ready-to-Ware offers to professional staff is too costly. Our quarterly profits have declined since the package was introduced two years ago, at the time of our incorporation. Moreover, the package had little positive effect, as we have had only marginal success in recruiting and training high-quality professional staff. To become more profitable again, Ready-to-Ware should, therefore, offer the reduced benefits package that was in place two years ago and use the savings to fund our current research and development initiatives.

Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.

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At the time of incorporation,an organisation faces several issues and challenges which if not resolved well in time can seriously affect its overall performance. However the argument in-evidently criticizes introduction of costly benefit packages offered to professional staff as the reason of declining quarterly profits in the past two years. The argument also fails to provide any suitable examples on the basis of which it could be evaluated that the packages of benefits and incentives are a major cost factor. Hence the argument is unconvincing and contains several flaws.

First, the argument identifies the packages of benefits and incentives being offered as too costly without providing any basis on which it could have been evaluated. The argument could have been more clearer if it compared the benefit and incentive package costs that Ready-to-Ware bears to those being borne by other organisations in the same industry. For example the incentives costs of a company having a comparable number of professional staff to that of Ready-to-Ware.Clearly the argument could have been much clearer if it explicitly stated that Ready-to-Ware has the highest incentives and benefits packages cost in the entire industry. The argument also claims that since the introduction of benefit packages, there has been a decline in the quarterly profits. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as the argument does not demonstrate any correlation between high package costs and declining profits. The argument fails to illustrate any other factors such as declining sales, increasing number of competitors or rising costs of raw materials, which may have increased costs or decreased revenues, thereby resulting in declining quarterly profits at Ready-to-Ware.

Second, the argument claims the packages being offered have not been successful in recruiting professional staff. The argument here considers that Ready-to-Ware's inability to recruit professional staff is solely because of unattractive benefits packages. There could be a number of reasons:a higher basic pay,inefficiently HR department, trust in the company's future, that would enable a professional to chose a company over Ready-to-Ware.If the argument had provided substantiated evidence that Ready-to-Ware was not able to recruit professional staff merely because of an unattractive incentives package, it would have been a lot more convincing,

Finally, the argument fails to answer as to how the funding of the current research and development initiatives would make Ready-to-Ware profitable again. Without convincing answers to this question, one is left with the impression that the step is more of a wishful thinking rather than a solution.

In sum, argument fails to establish that the professional staff packages are too costly and their introduction has resulted in declining quarterly profits. Argument could be strengthened if it provided a comparison between other incentives packages being offer in the industry and provided evidence supporting the claim. The argument could further be strengthened if it also provides evidence that establishes that costly incentives packages are not lucrative enough to recruit professional staff, and answers how funding the current research and development initiatives would lead to profitability at Ready-to-Ware.