Career Brand Management Specialization

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the current economy, Americans shift jobs every 4-5 years, which translates into 8-10 job transitions, including several career changes, over one’s life time. With competition for jobs on the rise, a person’s continuing employability and career success are increasingly defined by his or her mastery of individual career development and the ability to effectively "manage oneself" (P. Drucker).

In this course, you will learn how to think strategically and professionally about your career self-management. Through this course you'll develop an objective, external view of your marketable skills as a solid foundation for building a strong career brand. In particular, you'll be able to: - explain why developing a protean and boundaryless career perspective based on transferable (portable) skills is advantageous for continuing employability and career growth; - design your portable skills portfolio, identify and examine critically important competencies underpinning your transferable skills, and analyze your career self-management competency gaps; - increase self-awareness, pinpoint your career goals, and envision your future work self; - recognize the central role of self-management for developing transferable, marketable, skills and create a customized self-management information system (Career Development Lab) for ongoing personal development and professional growth; - conduct a thorough, competency-based job analysis in your area of interest and examine practices of evidence-based, data-driven competitive employee selection; -implement your newly developed skills for crafting effective selection criteria statements and refining your job applications.

In this course, you will engage in developing and strengthening the functional component of your career brand. Acting as “your own Chief Executive Officer” (P. Drucker), you will learn how to use strategic management models and techniques for enhancing your skills portfolio. You will learn how to increase your human capital by developing and documenting high-demand marketable skills. After completing this course, you will be able to:

- Implement business strategy and models and tools, such as benchmarking and SWOT analysis, for identifying and analyzing your competitive strengths and addressing competency gaps in a skill-based, competitive job selection context; - Understand evidence-based, data-driven skill assessment methodologies and techniques; - Select appropriate assessment tools and apply them for a thorough, accurate, evidence-based and data driven self-assessment of your transferable skills; - Create your critical competency profile ("The Self-Assessment Grid for Evaluation, or SAGE") and use it as an effective instrument for an objective, 360 degree self-assessment of your competitive strengths and competency gaps; - Create and use an effective instrument for organizing, directing and monitoring your skill-building activities (“The Skill-Building Dashboard, or Skill-Builder”); - Develop an effective tool (“The T-Portfolio”) for gathering and organizing samples of standards, best practices, assessment instruments and techniques in your chosen field; - Effectively organize your self-management information system to systematically collect and analyze job-related data, evaluate and assess required competencies and skills, develop and implement plans for self-improvement, and monitor your progress; - Develop and implement a realistic performance metric for your career development activities ("Your Present Job Market Value"); - Engage in self-coaching to support active self-development.

In this course, you will learn how to use strategic marketing and personal branding techniques for designing, enhancing, and promoting your professional image. Acting as "your own Chief Executive Officer" (P. Drucker), you will learn how to use relationship and network marketing and impression management to showcase your skills to prospective employers, colleagues, supervisors, and other interested parties. This course will help you to:

- Recognize the importance of marketing orientation and career brand building for your career development; use marketing communication strategies for your self-marketing; - Implement strategic marketing planning for your career development and engage in creating your own strategic self-marketing plan; - Devise strategies for managing your professional reputation; begin creating your personal brand, and plan steps for strategic personal branding; - Create personal branding statements, and integrate social networking into your career branding; - Refine your self-management information system to systematically collect and analyze self-marketing and personal branding related data, select appropriate tools and apply them for a thorough, accurate, evidence-based and data driven self-assessment of your self-marketing and personal branding skills; - Develop and implement an effective instrument for displaying your artifacts and monitoring your marketing communications strategies ("The Showcaser") and a realistic performance metric for evaluating your career brand building activities ("The Career Brand Equity Builder").