Hello again, this exercise is designed to illustrate how you can use a self-coaching tool that we call The Career Brand Equity Builder. The tool's designed to help you create a desired professional image and systematically work on showcasing your skills to target audiences and monitor the results. The tool is based on three other tools that we introduced and described in course two. Those tools are SAGE, or Self Assessment Grid for Evaluation, T Portfolio, the Skill Building Dashboard, and the Present Job Market Value. In a minute, we'll remind you of how those tools works, but you may still need to go back to course two for more detailed explanation. The above-mentioned tools are designed for the use in an individual career development lab where one can attempt to replicate a competitive selection environment. For example, this is how SAGE works. For a realistic job description in your area of interest, you can identify skill-based selection criteria and underpinning elementary competencies. Then, you can find corresponding critical tasks, identify standards or best practices as benchmarks, select assessment tools, collect samples of your performance, and conduct a self assessment. To make it accurate, we recommend that you work with peer reviewers and expert evaluators. Then, compare the results with the benchmarks and find out your total score. We call that the present job market value. If you're self-assessed results are accurate, they shouldn't be very different from those assigned to you by evaluators in a real job market setting. The idea is that the more skilled you are in self-assessment, the better you understand the job market and its requirements. The more honest you are at evaluating your own skills, the more accurate the model is, and the more you should be using it in your job preparation and skills development. A nice feature of the SAGE is that if it is done in Microsoft Excel, it allows us to present results as graphs or diagrams. All you need to do is to click on Chart. In course two, we called the results in var-chart the skill-building dashboard, and used it for a visual analysis of your competitive standing. Also it is good for analyzing your strengths and competency gaps. We should probably add a few words about the concept of present job market value. You may say that this is not an exact science, and that PJMV is not an objective metric such as your height, blood type or body temperature. This is correct. Character of PJMV is perceptional, and based on skill evaluation. Perhaps the closest analogy is the way that dancers are scored by judges in ballroom dancing or competitions. In all competitions, judges follow established rules, performance criteria and best practices. As a result, their scores are quite stable and are believed to more or less accurately measure the mastery of performers. When preparing for competitions, trainers and coaches must know exactly where athletes stand against competitors to better prepare for future encounters. So they can act as judges would and estimate possible scores. Self-coaching athletes do the same. They do know quite accurately what their present value is in terms of competitive standing with other athletes. In introducing PJMV, we ask you to act very much like self coaching athletes do. Not only do you set goals and exercise regularly, you also measure and evaluate your results using some realistic metrics and acting like judges or hiring managers. We also mentioned that learning how to use personal analytics is very cool and exciting. In course two, we suggested that you get familiar with the movement called the Quantified Self, and start thinking about SAGE as an analog to Apple Watch. The difference is that for each particular job, you'll get a different PJMV. Now, let's turn to modifying SAGE beyond skill-building. To begin, we'll need to extend the list of required job characteristics and include those that go beyond skills, like credentials, professional development, personality traits, and relevant experience. These characteristics are often required in job advertisements. For example, it is common to find requirements such as the level of qualification and personal attributes like attention to detail, or the ability to work unsupervised, or to multi task, or work under pressure, and others. The next adjustment is to include artifacts that a career developer may prepare for his or her job selection and promotional activities to communicate their skills to a prospective employer. Finally, there will be three levels for performance assessment. One level solely based on the person's mastery of skills as presented in his or her traditional resume and cover letter. The second level of assessment will take into account all artifacts created by the person to better present his or her mastery in the field. And the third level is reserved for performance assessment based on additional promotional activities and in person communications and interviews. All assessments are supposed to be external and done by either peer reviewers or expert evaluators to represent the perceptional side of the person's career brand. Now, if presented and promoted properly, a person's PJMV based on traditional job search documents, such as a resume and a cover letter, can increase as the result of purposeful artifact building and communicating with the target audience. In other words, the same level of skills can receive a higher score if they are better presented. The resultant increase in PJMV can be attributed to those brand-building activities. Following business strategy, we can call this increase career brand equity. As you can see, it is measurable and observable, and, as such, it can be managed and monitored. In the following presentation, we'll let you try the new tool. See you soon.
