In this lecture, we discuss what you may want to get out of an individual skills management training. Of course, in a short course we cannot possibly cover all aspects of it. Our goal is to provide you with a quick guide for future use. The intended outcomes of an individual skills management course or training are combined and presented here in a logic model that we call the individual skills management framework. As you will see, all outcomes are interrelated and built upon one another. Before we discuss the outcomes one by one, we'd like to briefly review the underlying philosophy of the model. You may think about the model as a strategy game which is designed to emulate efficient and successful skill building behavior in a competitive job market environment. The model is intended to empower you, a career builder, by turning you into a master of skills. To succeed in the competition for a particular job, job seekers must maximize the value of skills required on the job. The master of skills is the top performer, someone with the highest rank in the competition. We postulate that the value of required skills can be objectively estimated using a realistic simulation of the skill-based competitive job selection process. To become the master of skills, you will need to correctly identify and develop the required skill set trying to maximize its value. We believe that an ability to monitor the value of skills is a vital prerequisite to a competitive advantage on the job market. It's like having a GPS that can tell you where your skills are now and where exactly you want them to be to reach or surpass the required level. We think that the ability to quantify and monitor your skills will likely become even more important in the near future, as competitive job selection increasingly relies on artificial intelligence. To take full control of your numbers, you will need to use a powerful skills management technology. The technology that you use for developing your skills, must be capable of producing tangible outcomes that are immediately useful for competitive selection in your area. Are you in the game? Now, as you learned about the philosophy behind the model, we can go back to the intended outcomes of individual skills management training. The outcomes are as follows; the skilled self, skills inventory, skills analysis, skills management technology, the quantified self, skills display, skills development, career skills and skills management self-efficacy. Let's briefly review the outcomes one by one. The skilled self. This outcome is related to your self identity or in other words, it describes how you see yourself in a skill-based competition on the job market. You may recall that to achieve a competitive advantage, business strategists recommend that managers develop a resource-based view of the firm and focus on key competencies. Similarly, we propose that you should develop a skill-based view of yourself as a skilled professional, the master of skills. We think that focusing on skills will help you maximize the positive results of skill building activities and send a stronger message to potential employers. You may ask, what does it mean exactly in practical terms? Well, here's a practical definition. A master of skills is someone who can accomplish a set of required job-specific tasks in the best possible way with no or very little on-the-job training. Now if you think that you are the one, how would you convey that message to a potential employer? For example, would you rely solely on an old fashioned traditional generic resume that typically includes four items such as education, qualifications, work experience and personal traits? Outcome two, skills inventory. Suppose that you've got some skills, how should you sort them out? As a master of skills, you need to be able to organize them effectively. For example, perhaps you need to create a usable skills database so that you can keep track of your skills, identify and fulfill training needs and respond persuasively to job ads. But you know how to effectively organize your skills inventory? For example, wouldn't it be a good idea to compile a comprehensive list of your skills as often recommended by career trainers? While it may seem to be a good starting point, soon you will see that merely having a list of your skills is not sufficient for two reasons. First, if you were interested in specific jobs, you should be focusing on only some of the many possible skills that you have. Those that are the key competencies for the desired jobs. Second, if you think about it, you will see that it is not merely your skills that will matter most to a potential employer. Employers are typically concerned with finding solutions to their problems. Therefore, it makes sense for you to explicitly define what kind of concrete, job specific tasks you can accomplish or have accomplished in the past, with the use of each skill in your skills database. Outcome three, skills analysis. As a skilled professional, you must know how to objectively evaluate each of the skills in your skills inventory, using an evidence-based and data-driven approach. If you do not know how good you are performing job related tasks in relation to a widely accepted industry standard or best practice, you won't be able to make your case for recruitment or promotion. The important point is that you need to learn how to view your mastery of skills objectively from an external perspective. This is where learning about the use of performance management tools and techniques from the corporate world can be handy. For example, you may find it useful to utilize benchmarks and various techniques using expert peer and self-assessment. Outcome four, skills management technology. You probably know that in the business world, strategic planners develop key competencies with the use of various information management and decision support systems. It is logical to suggest that a master of skills should also be using an appropriate skills management technology. These days, skills management applications are widely used for personal development. For example, there are multiple apps for weight training, yoga, fitness, health management, archery, goal setting and many other things. For this course, we have developed a simple skills management application that will help us put the skills management framework to work. The cool thing about it is that you can not only use it for skill building, but also for preparing documents for competitive job selection for your next job. Stay tuned. Outcome five, the quantified self. When applying for a job, your job specific combination of skills is usually evaluated by an HR professional, a hiring manager or a selection board. The evaluation may happen even without you knowing about it as artificial intelligence is often used for scanning applications and recruiters databases. The point is that you may lose the competition without knowing that you participated. Just think about it. These days recruiters, selection boards and HR software robots can easily compare you with other job contenders. All your information that is considered relevant for the job, gets scanned, quantified, evaluated, summarized and converted into a numeric score. This means that all your skills as presented in your file are brought down to a single number and that number is compared to those of other job contenders. The question is whether you know that and if so, what are you going to do about it? Would you be interested in knowing what you're standing in the competition is? If you didn't get the job, how did you compare with the winner? Will it be cool to estimate and monitor your total skillset score while preparing for the next competition? We think that you as a master of skills should be able to objectively quantify your skills and more or less accurately estimate your likely ranking in the job selection. Outcome six, skills display. As a true master of skills, you should be able to provide a high quality response to a request for skills in a job advertising. First, you will analyze the job description and identify the required skill set. Second, drawing on your skills inventory, you will conduct a comprehensive skill set review and come up with a realistic competency dashboard. Then, you will know how to incorporate the results in your job application. For example, to adequately display your skills, you may select a combination of a customized functional resume, a detailed selection criteria statement, and a collection of artifacts associated with your LinkedIn account. Outcome seven, skills development. This is one of the most important outcomes of skills management training. It answers the question about how you can use skills management tools and techniques for creating a more skillful version of yourself. We think that as a skilled professional, you should think proactively about your future workself and be capable of setting and accomplishing very specific and quantifiable skill building goals. Finally, outcomes eight and nine. Once you have mastered the basics of skills management, you can use it not only for developing new functional skills in your area of interest but also for improving your career building skills. Such as self-management, self-marketing, personal branding, networking, interviewing and self-coaching. Just like other skills, career skills can be measured, monitored, refined and perfected. The self-efficacy outcome is to review your progress in light of your life and career goals. Then you can recharge and relaunch the game.
