Hello again and welcome to the career development lab. If you took the first two courses in this specialization, 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 the specialization, you may wish to access courses one and two and get familiar with the lab. In each of the courses, you can find this information in week one. One of the readings is called The CDL Weekly Schedule and it can be used for navigation. In Course 3, we offer you the chance to continue attending an advanced class in the lab. We will be drawing on the methods and techniques that we introduced in previous courses. If you haven't taken them, it might be a good idea to do it now. Alternatively, you may quickly browse CDL related materials in Course 2 to get familiar with some of the self coaching instruments such as the Self-Assessment Grid for Evaluation, or SAGE, the T-Portfolio, the Skill-building Dashboard, and the Present Job Market Value. In this course, we'll introduce two more instruments, the Showcaser and the Brand Equity Builder. The Showcaser will help you demonstrate and communicate your skills to prospective employers and other interested parties. The brand equity builder is designed to help you organize and monitor your career branding activities. Let's start with the showcaser. To begin, you may think about a typical job description in your area of interest. You may look it up on Monster or related job search tools. We ask you to do this exercise several times in Courses 1 and 2. Now, select one particular skill that is required on the job, for example, Presentation Skills. Earlier, we discussed how you can clarify what exactly is required on the job in terms of presentation skills, how you can identify critical tasks and required levels of mastery and determine what standards, an evaluation criteria can be used. You also learned how to provide an accurate self-assessment and develop a sound self improvement plan. All of the above were done in previous courses, where we used two supplementary self-coaching tools, a self-assessment grid and a T-portfolio. If you wish, you can download the templates and repeat the exercise. Suppose that you have achieved a certain level of mastery, and would like to showcase it. To help you organize and monitor this activity, we recommend using another tool, which we call the showcaser. To create a showcaser, we simply add three columns to the self assessment grid. In the first column, you record or provide links to the artifacts that you need to purposefully create and showcase using public spaces widely used in your professional area, like LinkedIn, YouTube, Slideshare, Facebook or more specialized outlets. For each of the artifacts, you will need to creatively develop a promotional strategy, including activities and campaigns. Otherwise, how will anyone know about it? Finally, you'll need to monitor results and decide on further actions. In week two, we'll discuss those questions in more detail and see how you can adjust the showcaser to your particular situation. Also you may thing about showcasing and communicating your skills as a skill in itself. The showcaser can teach you how to acquire the skill. First, you will need to divide it into sub-skills and identify critical tasks. Then, you'll need to find best practices in the field. Can you think of people who are exceptional in terms of showcasing skills? How do they do it with the use of digital media? What artifacts do they use? How do they use them? How do they promote them? Can you do the same? Pinpoint your performance and get it self and peer assessed. We think that if you really want to grow, you should be doing this kind of monitoring systematically. If you have achieved the highest level already, it is still good to know how better you are in comparison with others, and then focus on areas where there is still a lot of room for growth. Now, you can download the showcaser template and get ready to use it next week. Enjoy the course.