Competitive strategies adopted by Nairobi aviation college, Kenya

Abstract

Today’s business environment coupled with unrelenting competition and increased uncertainty has made it complex for many organizations to operate. There have been an emergence of better informed and more discriminating customers who have pushed this organizations to compete at the highest level with the primary focus of increasing their market share and safeguard against the unknown. Competition has been as a result of scarcity of resources, rareness of opportunities and yet the ease of entry in the market by rival organizations persists. In response, managers have opted to formulation and adoption of competitive strategies as they deploy organizational resources to meet the set objectives and create a sustainable competitive advantage over their rivals. The commonly used competitive strategies are Porter’s generic strategies such as Cost Leadership and Differentiation. This research is based on a case study of Nairobi Aviation College which has been in operation for sixteen years and has experienced extensive growth over time. The study had two objectives, the first objective of the study was to establish the competitive strategies adopted by Nairobi Aviation College and the second objective was to determine the challenges faced by Nairobi Aviation College in adopting competitive strategies. The study established that Nairobi Aviation College adopted several competitive strategies such as cost leadership, differentiation, expansion, resource regeneration and improvement. The strategies were very effective leading to the phenomenal growth of the institution. It was also established that the college faces many challenges in adopting competitive strategies such as high staff turnover, inadequate financial resources and employee resistance to new ways of doing things. The study recommends that companies should adopt competitive strategy that matches with their internal resource capabilities and synchronize them to the external environments instead of copying other companies’ strategies. The study also recommends that a survey be done on middle level colleges to enable generalization of findings.