Hello again. I'm Amy Giaculli. In this presentation, we'll review the career development lab activities in Course 2. If you took the first course in this specialization, Strategic Career Self-Management, you already know that the lab is designed as a training facility and a decision support system for your ongoing professional growth. The lab is intended to help you systematically collect and analyze job-related data, develop required competencies and skills, and engage in career branding activities. If you are new to this specialization, you may access Course 1 and get familiar with the lab. You can find this information in week one, which is called Getting Started. One of the materials on that page is called the CDL weekly schedule, and it can be used for navigation. The schedule provides an overview of the workouts in Course 1. In Course 2, we invite you to continue working in the lab. But before we begin, let's briefly review what we did in the lab during Course 1. This is important as it is likely that you'll need to reuse some of the work that you've previously done. Overall, the central idea of the lab activities in Course 1 was to help you prepare for individual career development. It was done by going through a sequence of steps. First, we invited you to engage in a comprehensive review of your skills and personality traits. Then we learned how to analyze skills acquisition by doing a competency analysis. After that, you identified and analyzed your career-building skills. Next, you focused on developing a capacity to build new skills. Finally, we invited you to envision your future work self, with a particular focus on new skills acquisition. When working in the lab, you were also able to develop an objective external perspective view of your competencies and skills, examine the process of the skills based, competitive selection, and learn how to better address selection criteria in a job application. The list is quite impressive, isn't it? Those of you who attended Course 1 did a great job. So what's next? As course developers, we see the main goal of the lab as providing a facility for career fitness activities. As stated by researchers and practitioners, in the new economy, it is the individual who is ultimately responsible for his or her own career development. One way to succeed is to stay fit, and just like building muscles at the gym, work on career fitness in a personalized training lab. We expect that as a result of taking Course 1, you have built some career muscles and are ready for advanced training. In Course 2, we offer you the chance to attend an advanced class in the lab. We'll be drawing on the methods and techniques that we introduced in Course 1. So if you haven't taken it, it might be a good idea to do that now. While the main goal of using the lab in Course 2 remains the same, the way that we will stay career fit is different from Course 1. This time you'll be using a range of specifically designed instruments or tools to organize, direct, support and monitor your skill building activities. Working in the lab, you'll be able to objectively evaluate your current standing in terms of marketable skills against job requirements and the competition. Knowing where you are and where you should be will tell you about where you need to grow and how much you need to grow to reach your career goals. This, in turn, will help you customize your career fitness program to your unique needs. For instance, you'll be able to strategically select only those professional development activities that can better address your developmental needs. You'll be better positioned to gain a competitive edge if you know exactly where to improve and how much you need to improve over the likely competition. Your evidence-based and data driven approach to self development can also be a good selling point in your career endeavors. When conducting a thorough and objective bench marking of your skills against standards and the competition, at the same time you'll be collecting and documenting evidence of your mastery in the field and getting ready to prove that you either have achieved the required level of competency or that you are developing your skills in the right direction. By learning how to use and customize skill building and other self-developmental instruments, you'll learn the basics of career self-coaching and will actually start practicing it. While it is great to have a professional coach helping you in career development, it may be difficult to find someone, or it may be very costly. For these reasons, it may be very handy to have a self-coaching toolbox at your disposal. As in the previous course, the lab is organized in the form of weekly workouts. You'll find downloadable templates under CDL Workout videos. Peer reviews and the final quiz in the course are based on the lab activities. The tools that you will master in this course will be used heavily in this and the next course and in the capstone. So please do not throw them away. Overall, working on your career fitness program will help meeting the career success requirements identified in the literature and addressed in the specialization. We sincerely hope that you'll find our approach to career fitness useful and that you'll visit the lab often after completion of this specialization. Please remember that peer feedback is one of the most valuable and powerful tools for self improvement. Are you coming? Have a good workout.
