Hello again, I'm Amy Giaculli. Welcome to week four. This is a very short week, we'll take a few minutes to quickly review the course and the entire specialization. Then we would like to ask you to answer questions in the end of course survey. This way, you'll be able to review and reflect on your results. Also, if you're doing this course for a certificate, there's a quick final quiz to complete. In this course, you've learned how to use strategic marketing and personal branding models and techniques for designing, enhancing and promoting your professional image. Acting as your own Chief Executive Officer, you have learned how to use relationship and network marketing as well as impression management to communicate and showcase your skills. And personality traits to prospective employers, colleagues, supervisors and other interested parties. In the beginning of the course, we clarified the difference between the selling concept and the marketing orientation concept in relation to individual career brand building. We also discussed how strategic marketing and brand management models and techniques can be used for self marketing. And we invited you to conduct an objective and thorough self marketing audit. When dealing with self marketing and personal branding, one needs to better understand his or her own self. For this purpose, we examine the concept of the skilled self as a product, service, and brand. As a result, we came up with the models of the extended skilled self and communicated skilled self for self marketing and personal branding purposes. Next, we use these models to examine how you can create and use digital artifacts to demonstrate your level of proficiency in performing critical tasks related to a particular job. Also, the models were used to show how you can enhance your ability to showcase mastery to prospective employers and other interested parties. After that, we discussed how you can use push and pull strategies for career branding. Push strategies include relationship and network marketing. Pull strategies are related to career brand building and include reputation management and impression management. During week two, you learned how to use marketing communication strategies such as advertising, promotion, public relations, and direct marketing for self-marketing purposes. You also engaged in creating your own strategic self-marketing plan in developing strategies for communicating it to perspective employers. In this course, we introduced new self-coaching tools such as The Showcaser and the brand equity builder. The Showcaser is designed to help demonstrate and communicate one skill to prospective employers and other interested parties. The Career Brand Equity Builder is developed to better organize and monitor career branding activities and is based on the concept of brand equity. During week three, you learned how to develop effective personal branding strategies and create your personal branding plan. You also engaged in creating a personal branding statement and examined various ways of communicating it to perspective employers. You examined how building a powerful professional image contributes to a strong career brand and devised strategies for managing professional reputations. You also developed an improved understanding of impression management and learned how to integrate social networking into your career branding. In this course, you continued working in the Career Development Lab learning how to effectively organize your self management information system. And used it to systematically collect and analyze self marketing and personal branding related data. Develop and implement plans for self improvement and monitor your progress. And you selected appropriate tools and applied them for a thorough, accurate, evidence based, data driven, self-assessment of your self marketing and personal branding skills. In particular, you learned how to develop and implement an effective instrument for displaying your artifacts and monitoring your marketing communication strategies with The Showcaser. Develop and implement a realistic performance metric for evaluating your career brand building activities with the Career Brand Equity Builder. This helped you to integrate self marketing, and personal branding tools with skill building and self assessment instruments such as The Self-Assessment Grid for Evaluation or SAGE, The T-Portfolio and Your Present Job Market Value. As a result, you further expanded the assortment of a valuable developmental tools in your self coaching tool box. In addition, you continued learning how you can effectively use peer assessment to validate marketing and personal branding activities. Now after you've taken all the fundamental courses and the specialization, what are in your opinion the three most valuable learning outcomes of the entire specialization? We suggest that you take a minute to talk about it and discuss it with the other students. Then, we'll tell you what we as course developers think about it. Of course, your answer is dependent on your personal situation and goals. For example, you may find it most valuable to learn how to craft a detailed selection criteria statement in Course One. Or benchmark your mastery against best practices in Course Two. Or design you desired professional image in Course Three. In our opinion, the three most important learning outcomes of the entire specialization are the following. First, it is an ability to objectively sees your skills and capabilities from an external perspective as shown in the chorus and supported by research data. This ability is valuable, rare, and well worth your efforts to develop. Second, it is an ability to effectively use evidence based and data driven techniques for self improvement. If acquired, this skill will help you to know what needs to be done and how it should be done to outperform the competition. Finally, it is an ability to create a powerful personal image and communicate it to your target audience. As they say in marketing, the value of all your assets is zero if you cannot bring them to the market. All three outcomes combined are the cornerstones of career brand management. You can also think about career brand management As a complex skill area where self management, brand development and self marketing are required elementary competencies to master the skill. If you master them, you should be well positioned to effectively differentiate yourself on the job market. Basically, this is what we meant by referring to you as the CEO of enterprise you at the beginning of the specialization. We hope that you did enjoy the course and obtained a Coursera verified certificate to confirm that you have acquired theoretical knowledge. And applicable skills in Strategic Career Self-Management, Career Brand Development and Strategic Self-marketing. As we previously mentioned, the specialization is based on an online for credit advance level course, taught for business majors at State University of New York's Empire State College. The course is offered three times a year, and is open for non degree, undergraduate and graduate students. At this point, we'd like to ask you if there's anything missing that we didn't cover in the specialization that you would like to know more about. Also, what do you think the next steps are in your self developmental journey should be? There's one particular topic that is closely related to the theme of specialization that we've touched upon, but didn't cover in depth. This is about where and how to find opportunities for a lucrative career. We think there is no scientific answer to this question. Also, these days a successful career might include a significant entrepreneurship component, an expatriate experience, a convenient of working from home, and a better work-life balance. We assume that when you decided to build a strong career brand, you'd already figured out what you were going to do with your career. But it may happen that as a result of taken this specialization you've decided to give it more thought. If you did, this is great, because by now, you know more about the area of your interest and how to best be prepared for the job. There's one more course and specialization. It is called Career Total Fitness. The final capstone course is designed as a training facility, where you will further enhance your marketable skills by creating and discussing with peers. Your evidence-based portfolios, professional development plans, personal self-marketing, and branding strategies, presentations, and public profiles. See you there.
