Hello again, I'm Amy Giaculli. Welcome back to the Career Development Lab. In this presentation we'll review week two's learning activities and do a few more exercises to help you better understand skills assessment and practice the use of skills assessment instruments. You may ask why we are spending so much time learning about assessment instruments and techniques. If the goal of the specialization is to help you gain a competitive edge on the job market, why don't we focus on improving your resume? The answer is that in order to tweak a resume, there is no need to take an academic course. There are a lot of useful resources on the Internet. Also, you can get good advice from career advisor or a colleague. But resume tweaking can not get you new skills. If you really want to grow, then the strategic solution is to create a future work self and engage in self developmental activities. To do so, you'll need to develop an ability for conducting a thorough and accurate self assessment. But before you can begin self-assessing yourself, it is a good idea to examine how experts conduct assessment of other people's skills. This is what we are doing in week two. The plan, then, is to learn the basic skills-assessment and then apply this knowledge for self-assessment purposes in week three and four. To better understand how skills assessment works, we are using a case study introduced in week one. In the case, we deal with Demode, a fictitious company which is conducting a job search for a recently vacated position of communications manager. In the case, you also met Rick, the hiring manager, who was charged with the responsibility of organizing the selection process, and then assessing the candidates' skills to select the best candidate for the job. As we can see in Rick's case, crafting a job advertising message requires the hiring manager carefully examine the company's needs and identify the desired characteristics that the successful candidate must possess. Hiring managers must also think in advance about how they will assess candidates. Now, if you are a prospective candidate, would you be interested in having a clear understanding of what is on Rick's mind? The case study helps us demonstrate that for a prospective job applicant it is vitally important to clearly understand what the hiring manager wants the successful candidate to be. For example, the position specified in the job advertisement, in the case, excellent written communications are required. But what does it mean exactly? Every job is unique, even in the same industry and within the same company. As we can see in the case for the described position, a broad area of written communications is broken down into three distinct competencies. Namely, effective digital communications, informational reports, and writing a presentation. Also, the level of of importance of those competencies are different. This breakdown explains what the hiring manager wants from the position and how he or she will likely approach the assessment of candidates. If you were a candidate, would you be interested in knowing about this breakdown? Would it be helpful for you to learn about it in advance to better prepare your application? If this information were not available for candidates, would you be able to guess it by analyzing the job description? The next slide provides you with further insight into the employer's mind. This is something that job candidates usually do not see. But this is not rocket science. The logic of the process is quite simple. The assessors are supposed to compare the candidate's actual perceived level of performance against certain benchmarks, such as standards or best practices, and assign scores. Of course, this also is not an exact science. Evaluators can only assess what they see in the candidate's documents or presentation. In addition, evaluators are not robots. They make mistakes. Now, let's review what we've so far learned about skills assessment in relation to this case study. To conduct a skills assessment, an expert evaluator would begin with examining the job description, and breaking down broad skill areas into smaller chunks that we call elementary competencies. For each elementary competency the expert would prepare critical tasks, identify benchmarks, and define full mastery, select appropriate assessment tools, and conduct assessment. The Week 2 lectures and exercises provided you with some illustrations of how to conduct skills assessment in written communications. To practice skills assessment in a different area, let's consider presentation skills. In the case study, Rick, the hiring manager, identified presentation skills as one of the job requirements. He further clarified this requirement by subdividing presentation skills into two categories. Preparing a PowerPoint presentation and delivering a PowerPoint presentation. Are you ready to continue this work on your own? When this video stops, you can download the presentation skills assessment grid template. Please fill it in and answer in video quiz questions, then continue watching. The most intriguing part of skills assessment is to find out how experts actually do assessment. Do they use manuals and assessment guides? How do they know about the best practices in the field? After you get ready for conducting a skills assessment, you'll face two important questions. Where can you get authentic samples for assessment? Where can you observe the work of masters? Getting samples of expert evaluations is an important part of self developmental work. How would you master skills assessment and then self assessment without observing the work of masters? Interestingly, those samples are not that easy to find and capture. We'd like to save this topic for the peer review assignment. In the case study there are two more broad skill areas to examine, information technology skills and all other skills combined, including customer service and time management. We suggest that you work on these tasks on your own, and repeat the sequence of steps we suggested earlier. You can modify and use the template that you used for the presentation skills assessment. In the end, as a bonus exercise, we'd like to ask you two questions. The first question is that skills assessment does sound like a lot of work. Do people really do it when working on selection teams? The second question is about finding benchmarks, standards, and best practices in soft skills. In vocational skills, there are professional requirements and certifications. So it doesn't seem to be very tricky to find out about someone's proficiency and currency. What about soft skills, and even more, personality traits and attributes? For example, if resilience is required, what would be a standard for that? You may use the forum to respond and discuss. Have fun.
