Hello again. I'm Amy Giaculli, in this presentation, we'll provide an overview of week one and explain our approach to career brand development and self coaching. As you may recall from the previous course, a strong career brand is a combination of superior skills and a powerful personal image. We defined the skills component as the functional side of a career brand and the image component as its emotional side. In course two, we focus on the functional side of brand building, skills development. While no one would disagree this skills development is important, it is not an easy task for an individual to develop a viable strategy for growing his or her skills. For example, how can one figure out which particular skills to develop? How to develop them? To what degree? And, how to monitor progress? Having answers to those questions is important because in real life the amount of time a person can invest in his or her professional development is very limited. There are many academic and professional development courses out there, but which one should you take? What level of mastery should you achieve? And how can you make the skills acquisition process sufficient? In a highly competitive job market environment, the efficiency of skills development by a person is linked to the person's marketability. In other words, if there are two opportunities for professional development, you should choose the one that brings you closer to your desired job and better helps you outperform the competition. But how would you know that? It would be really helpful if you had an instrument to measure the efficiency of your professional development efforts and could compare your results with your competition. This hypothetical instrument would tell you about the level of your mastery and performing critically important skills and could monitor your progress when doing professional development activities. You can think about it as a kind of key performance indicator or KPI, used by companies to appraise performance levels of their employees. KPIs are usually based on competency analysis, the techniques that you have learned in the previous course. To create an instrument for evaluating one's skill level, we will be using the same approach as in the previous course in which we introduced the selection dashboard. A selection dashboard is simply a chart that plots the levels of candidates mastery in performing specified critical tasks in the process of competitive selection for a particular job. Using a selection dashboard is helpful to compare the candidates readiness for the job. Of course, this is not an exact science, this is just based on the perceptions of evaluators, but when it is performed by experts it's usually quite accurate. Even when scientists are selected for their scientific jobs, selection is usually done by people not robots, using the described competency based selection procedures. In this course, we will further develop the idea of the selection dashboard and introduce a new tool for professional development which we call the skill builder dashboard or simply the skill builder. Skill builder will allow you to plot your levels of mastery in performing critical tasks on a chart and compare them with the standards or best practices in the field. This tool will help you plan and organize your skill building activities, monitor and document progress, prepare job applications, and engage in self coaching. Armed with the instrument, you will be able to better analyze, strategize, measure, and monitor skill development activities and make the most of your professional development time while preparing for your dream job. During week one, we will discuss how to create, customize and use the skill builder, we will also introduce a range of supplementary metrics and tools such as your present job market value, self-assessment grid for skills evaluation or SAGE, and T portfolio. Once you become familiar with skill building tools, you'll be ready to conduct the skill building activities in weeks two, three, and four. In week two, you'll learn from experts about how to perform assessment. In week three, you will focus on theories, tools, and techniques for self-assessment. And during week four, we'll show you how you can put it all together. The overall goal of week one is to equip you for brand building. As you see in course two and three, the very same tools that you will learn during this week will continue serving you for your self marketing purposes. We do hope that by becoming familiar with relevant, theoretical frameworks and acquiring skill building tools in this specialization, you equip yourself for career take off. So get ready and enjoy the ride.
