Hello again. In this presentation we'll review the first course in this specialization, Strategic Career Self-Management. To begin let me clarify why we named it Strategic Career Self-Management with a subtitle, A Skill to get Skilled. The term career management is often used to describe workforce development programs undertaken by corporations or public organizations and aimed at managing the careers of their employees. For individuals interested in climbing the corporate ladder career management provided by organizations can be really helpful. But having someone else manage your career can be risky, especially when, keeping in mind, that these days individuals must change careers often. There's a huge benefit in learning how to self-manage your career. The term career self-management is used to capture an individual's perspective on career planning and development. Career self-management is what an individual can and should do in order to be in charge of his or her own career. A tactical approach to career self-management deals with short-term planning and immediate actions. For example, taking a Coursera course in business analytics to add a certificate to your resume for a job interview next month. A strategic approach to career self-management focuses on long-term career planning decisions. For example, setting career goals, obtaining a degree, entering a profession, or launching a new business. In this course, we suggest that you adhere to a long-term strategic approach to career self-management. Using business terminology, you may see yourself as a kind of enterprise in a competitive environment where critical success factors are your skills and your brand. In acting as the CEO of your enterprise you must design and implement the best possible strategy that will bring you from your current situation to where you want to be. Now, if we go back to recommendations for career success in literature, we can see that the first two critical success factors are related to embracing the role of the CEO in the enterprise you. In the course, we'll discuss various aspects of being a CEO, including self-organization and self control. In terms of self strategy development, you were supposed to set your career goals. This is outside of the course. But once they are established, career goals will help you design your future work self and identify required competencies and skills within the course. Increasing one's human capital by developing transferable skills is the central idea of career self-management as recommended by researchers and practitioners. To take on this you, as the CEO of enterprise you, will need to know what skills you need to develop, in what degree, and how to measure results and monitor progress. But before engaging in the business of skill building, you may want to find out why getting skilled is so important for career success in the current job market. According to Gallup research, only 11% of American business leaders strongly agree with this statement, that higher education institutions in this country are graduating students with the skills and competencies that their business needs. So, the more skills you get, the better prepared you are for the job market. Other Gallup research shows us that, when hiring, U.S. business leaders say that the amount of knowledge the candidate has in a field, as well as applied skills, are more important factors then where a candidate attended school or what his or her college major was. So it is the skills portfolio not the degree by itself that really matters. Transferable skills are particularly important for career success. Transferable skills are those skills that are not job specific and can be used in various settings. They include communication skills, problem solving, team work, cross cultural skills, and other skills. A common problem with transferable skills is that there is a huge mismatch between job applicants' perceptions of their readiness for the job and prospective employers expectations. A topic recently researched by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, AACU, shows that the students' and employers' perceptions of the students' mastery in performing some critically important transferable skills are dramatically different. For example, in regards to written communication skills, 65% of the students tend to think that they are well prepared, wheres only 27% of the employers think the same. In other words, three out of four employers think that students' skills are not marketable. Based on the above analysis, we have come up with a list of problems that you, as CEO of Enterprise You, will need to address to achieve a competitive edge on your area of interest. Are your skills sufficient to fulfill your career plans? What skills should you have in your portfolio? Can you objectively evaluate the current market value of your skills portfolio? How can you demonstrate your actual mastery and marketability of skills? Do your skills solve prospective employer's problem? An ability to address the afformentioned problems will help you position yourself as a skilled professional, a kind of black belt in the area of your interest. This can be potentially your competitive advantage in the job market whereas it is increasingly difficult to sell to prospective employers one's experiences and credentials. But even if you know exactly what you should include in your skills portfolio and what the level of mastery that you are supposed to achieve in performing those skills is, there is still one more skill that you have to develop. That is the skill of acquiring other skills, also known as self-directed learning. Developing this master skill, a skill to get skilled, is critical for career success. Overall, in Course 1, you will achieve the following learning and developmental goals. You will embrace the role of the CEO of Enterprise You to become responsible for your strategic career self-management, develop a skill based view of yourself, create and begin using career development and skill building tools, such as self-management information system in the career development lab. During weeks two and three, you'll gain knowledge and analytical skills for career self-management. In particular, you will learn how to analyze competencies and skills, develop your skills portfolio and conduct a self-audit of your career development skills, increase self-awareness, and engage in designing your future work self, acquire necessary knowledge and skills for self-strategy and self-direction. During weeks four and five, you'll learn how to apply career self-management skills for professional growth. In particular, you will learn how to develop an objective external view of your skills portfolio, understand competitive selection based on evaluation of candidates' skills portfolios, master evidence-based, data-driven evaluation of required skills, find out how to assess the current market value of your skills portfolio. In the end of each week we'll invite you to the Career Development Lab, or CDL. CDL is a challenging intellectual gym designed to strengthen your career muscle through weekly workouts. Every workout will begin with a brief video lecture and continue with working on a capstone task. We recommend that you do the workouts sequentially, but you can also skip some and then return later. We hope you will enjoy the course and find it useful for your career development. Welcome to the course.
