Hello again. In this final presentation we'll introduce another self-coaching tool. We call this tool self-assessment grid. And we'll be using it in week three to guide you through self-assessment. The basic fact about self-assessment is that it is a sort of assessment where you are supposed to act as an evaluator of your own skills, and use the same instruments and techniques as an expert evaluator would use for assessment of your skills. The problem is that your assessment qualification and experience may not be sufficient. Also, you can be biased. In week three lectures, we'll address those problems. Right now, we would like to show you the instrument we'll be using for self-assessment. It does look familiar as it is based on the assessment grid that you already know how to use. For conducting a thorough and accurate self-assessment, you'll need to follow the same steps as you did when preparing to conduct the skills assessment earlier this week. Namely, you'll need to examine a broad skills area and break it down into elementary competencies. Then define critical task to be assessed, identify benchmarks, select appropriate assessment tools and think about the techniques that an expert evaluator reviews in a given case. When this video stops, you can download the presentation skills self-assessment grid template. Please fill it in and answer the in-video quiz questions, then continue watching. In addition to the above steps, when working on your self-assessment, you'll need to collect evidence of your mastery in performing identified critical tasks. Then you'll need to assess your mastery by comparing with the benchmark and assigning a numerical score. The assessment you do by yourself should be compared with the one done by your peers and ideally an expert evaluator, for example, your supervisor. If all three results are not dramatically different, then your self-assessment is pretty accurate. If your results are below the benchmark, it's good to identify and indicate into the self-assessment grid your competency gaps as detected by yourself, your peers, and the expert evaluator. Collecting evidence of your own performance is a very important part of self-developmental work. It can be done with the use of electronic repositories or by printing and storing it in a binding folder. How you capture, collect, and store your artifacts doesn't really matter. What matters is how you analyze, make sense of them, and use them for self-improvement. In the week three activities, we'll continue this conversation and use presentation skills as an example. Earlier, we mentioned the role of the T-Portfolio for self-developmental work. Traditionally, career advising literature is mostly concerned with accumulation of specimens of a candidate's own performance in the form of an electronic repository, so-called E-Portfolio. Collecting samples of your own performance can be helpful but it doesn't provide you with examples of exemplary performance and doesn't give you tools for a valid self-assessment. That's why we recommend using a T-Portfolio as a collection of publicly available samples of best practices, standards, assessment tools and techniques in the area of your intended growth. The aim of creating a T-Portfolio is to clearly and explicitly define mastery in performing a given elementary competency and later use it as a target for professional growth. Earlier, we provided an example of T-Portfolio for written communication skills. In week three, you will have the chance to think about how to capture excellence in preparing and delivering PowerPoint presentations in the context of the case study. Then you will use this information for your self-assessment and self-developmental work. One of the intended results of a thorough and accurate self-assessment is to develop an external and objective view of your competency in the field and explicitly identify your competency gaps in very concrete terms. This will help clarifying your professional development goals and allow dividing them into measurable objectives for improvement. As a result, you should be able to formulate your self-developmental goals in a measurable way. For example, you should be able to tell where your bottlenecks are and how much they contribute to your overall standing in a particular competitive selection process. And, in which areas you'll need to improve and by how much. Overall, this is what we call an evidence based and data driven approach that we hope will give you a better sense of direction for self-improvement.
