Hello again. In this presentation, we'll discuss the product that your going to bring to the market, the self. Interestingly, there are many possible selves, depending on the social context each person may assume different identities. For example, the same person can have one identity for dating on the web. And use another for work related activities. Even professional identities can be different. For example, one identity as an employer, and another as an entrepreneur. So how shall we define the self in this course? In previous courses, we mainly focused on individual, work-related characteristics and examined the concept of future work self. A person's future work self, is his or herself image of desired work related characteristics. A future work self, is his or her vision for the knowledge, skills, and abilities to acquire for career growth. As we discussed earlier, if you are interested in purposefully building your skills and capabilities a clear vision of your future work self may serve as a blueprint for your own self development. When you are thinking about career growth, you must take into account how your skills and capabilities are perceived by other people. If you are a skilled person, then the more employers know and appreciate your mastery in a certain field, the likelier they will be to hire you and the better your career prospects should be. Wouldn't it be great if you could control or at least influence the way other people see you? Or we may put it this way. Can one manage his or her own professional image by regulating impressions that other people develop about his or her work related skills and capabilities. In this course we'll explore how you, a career developer, can design a desired professional image and use marketing and branding tools and techniques to communicate it to prospective employers and other interested parties. As skills and capabilities are the central elements of your desired professional image. Let's call the product that you are bringing to the market the skilled self. For this product, prospective employers, colleagues, supervisors can all be considered customers. What you want to do is correctly position yourself in the minds of your target audience. And use a variety of push and pull strategies to deliver your message, and eventually get hired and reach your career goals. Push strategies will include self marketing techniques such as advertising, promotion, direct selling, and public relations. Pull strategies will include personal branding and impression management. As your customers are simultaneously exposed to promotional messages that are sent by many other job seekers and career developers, your goal is to stand out and make sure that your vision of yourself as the skilled self adequately translates into their impression of you as the preferred candidate. So, the skilled self is a desired professional image of one's self that a job applicant or a career developer designs and then needs to transmit to the target audience and make sure that it is adequately translated by them. Can you think about the desired professional image that you want to transmit to your target audience? How would you describe it? You may find that designing and transmitting a desired professional image Is not a very easy undertaking as people may say things differently than you do. Also, the message to be transmitted can be quite complex and will most likely include several layers of information. Let's see what those layers are. The fundamental layer includes information about one's personality traits and personal attributes and is deeply rooted in the person's values, beliefs learning and thinking styles and cultural identification. This is the very core of who the person is. You may call this layer the Core Self. One's core qualities underpin and augment skills development. For example an ability to be a quick learner, or work under pressure or be creative. In course one, we discussed personality traits in more detail. In this course, we should think about how to package them, and present, as part of your desired professional image. In the process of education training, and professional growth, an individual develops his, or her, inner self by adding to it a layer of competencies consisting of new knowledge, skills and abilities. As a result, here she becomes a carrier of marketable skills, at least in the eyes of prospective employers. This is what we called the skilled self. And what a career developer brings to the job market. But how would employers and other interested parties know about what is hidden inside of you? Degrees and diplomas can provide information about education, but how can one package and present his or her skills and abilities? To make one's skills and abilities visible to outside parties, the person needs to create a layer of artifacts. An artifact is a physical object such as a document, image, certificate, plaque or a sign or a digital object such as website, e-portfolio or a badge. Artifacts serve as evidence of one's mastery in a chosen field. You can think of artifacts as extensions of your skilled self that are visible, verifiable and clearly understood by your target audiences. In many professional occupations, the need for creating extended skilled selves, was recognized a long time ago. For example, when visiting a doctor's office, you can find an office plaque with the doctor's credentials on the wall. What do you think is the purpose of that artifact? What is it supposed to tell you? What is your impression when you've visited a doctor's office for the first time? In today's digitized world, almost everyone has obtained a digital identity, which is based on digital artifacts. Digital artifacts include electronic resumes, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, e-portfolios, websites, blogs, Twitter SlideShare presentations and so on. For a career developer, creating an impressive and effective layer of digital artifacts is a powerful way of presenting his or her skilled self to the target audience. Now if we go back to the image representing the candidates screening in the process of competitive selection, we can interpret it as an employer's reading of the available artifacts. This is a process in which the employer scans, processes, and integrates all the layers of information and forms and impression of each candidate. But happens when several equally skilled candidates compete for a job? How do employers make hiring decisions in those situations? As we saw in the previous lecture, the situation is very similar to one of consumer decision making, in which a consumer needs to make a choice between competing brands. According to consumer behavior researchers, when consumers are facing alternative choices, they combine knowledge with affective feelings about products. To form an overall evaluation or a brand attitude. So a strong career brand is one that can stand out by reaching the prospective employer on a very deep level, so to speak. Later in the week and even in more week three, we will examine the process of impression management in more detail. The goal of impression management is to focus and amplify the signal that your career brand is sending to the employer. According to leading authorities on marketing communications, Jack Trout and Al Ries, you have to consider that only a little of your messages is going to get through to the employer. The employers mind can only take in so much information and it blocks out everything that is not important or relevant. Trout and Ries define positioning as what you do to the mind of the prospect. So your tasks are two fold. First you need to correctly position the product In the mind of a prospect. Second, the signal you are sending must be strong enough. Now, let's see what you can do for your career brand image to be strong. If you can communicate that you are a genuinely good person, trustworthy, hard working, and strong values, this is great and absolutely necessary. But cannot be enough to qualify for a highly skilled position. If you can prove that you've got required competencies and skills, you'll add significantly to your brand. Can you adequately support your claim with evidence of your mastery? Can you make your skills and abilities visible? Now we can do one more step. If you did a good job of creating a solid layer of artifacts to prove and demonstrate your mastery in the field, would it be enough to support your brand? The answer actually depends on the competition in your area. If you are in a rare situation where employers and recruiters are desperately looking for people like you, chances are they will immediately notice and even chase you. But if this is not the case and there is a lot of competition in the area, you will probably need to do more to stand out and promote yourself. How would you do this? The final layer that you'll need to add to your product is communication various forms, and through a variety of channels. Including interpersonal live communications social media, web presence, referrals and emails. It is though communication that your product your skilled self comes alive and can advocate for you. Without properly arranged and actually working communication channels your skilled self may remain the best kept secret in town. Let's review what we've discussed so far. The product that you are bringing to the market is your skilled self. It is based on your core self that includes your personal characteristics, personality traits, value and beliefs, and defines who you are. The central element of the skilled self is the unique combination of competencies and skills, the very reason a prospective employer would want to hire you. Each of your skills must be properly documented and supported by artifacts, proving your mastery in the field. Finally, you need to find ways to properly communicate your skilled self to target audiences. In the following presentations, we'll talk about the use of marketing theory for self-marketing. Some of the topics we'll discuss are what is marketing philosophy? How relevant is it for self marketing? What is marketing audit, and how can it be used for career branding? What is relationship marketing, network marketing? Is there any use of popular marketing mix models, such as four p and seven c, for self marketing? I'll see you soon.
