Career Self-Management Training and Certification

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.

Designed with the modern professional in mind, our skills management course is your transformative journey towards career success. This course offers key insights into strategies for skills-based hiring, enabling you to identify and analyze job-specific skills in your chosen field. You'll establish a systematic process for auditing and advancing your skills, boosting your professional agility. Throughout this course, you'll become familiar with Generative AI as a forward-thinking tool for skills assessment, self-assessment, and development. This understanding will place you at the forefront of your profession, ready to embrace and navigate the rapidly evolving world of AI in skills management. Diving deeper, we unpack the principles of valid and reliable skills assessment, familiarizing you with essential standards and benchmarks. You'll master techniques for assessing skill acquisition and form a robust process for gathering the necessary tools and techniques. Here, we explore the potential of Generative AI, an emerging technology that could further refine these assessment techniques. Then, emphasizing self-awareness, the course guides you to effectively self-assess your job-specific skills, reinforcing your assessments with peer and expert feedback. You'll learn to estimate your total skillset score for specific skill sets, creating a foundation for career advancement. At this stage, we discuss how Generative AI could potentially enhance the accuracy of self-assessments in the future. In the final stages, we discuss planning and executing skill-building training interventions using SMART goals. You'll use innovative tools such as Your Present Job Market Value, Self-Assessment Grid for Skills Evaluation (SAGE), and T-portfolio. The potential of Generative AI to improve these processes is also considered, positioning you at the cutting edge of your professional journey. Upon completion of this course, you'll be equipped with the knowledge, tools, and innovative thinking necessary to optimize your skill-building journey and achieve career growth and advancement. With our course, you're not just taking a step forward; you're launching into a brighter, AI-augmented future. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to: • Identify and analyze job-specific skills in your area of interest. • Develop a systematic process for analyzing and auditing your skills. • Discover standards and benchmarks for assessing mastery of skill acquisition. • Develop a process for gathering tools and techniques for skills assessment. • Self-assess your mastery in job-specific skills, verified using peer/expert feedback. • Estimate your total skillset score for job-specific skill sets. • Plan and execute a skill-building training intervention using SMART skill-building goals. • Understand the potential use of Generative AI in skills assessment, self-assessment, and development and remain at the forefront of your professional journey by being informed about emerging technologies. This course is an invaluable stepping-stone towards your career growth and advancement, giving you the tools, insights, and innovative thinking needed to optimize your skill-building journey.

In the business world, modern organizations conduct corporate retreats on a regular basis to consider their strategic direction, review progress, and set up goals and objectives for the year. In this course you will use the same approach to organize, strategize, re-energize, and re-invigorate your career building activities. The final Capstone Project is designed as an annual retreat aimed at facilitating your ability to step back from day-to-day demands and strategically focus on gaining a competitive edge on the job market by investigating new opportunities for career growth, conducting a thorough audit of your skill-building and self-marketing strategies, and developing new ways to enhance and showcase your marketable skills. The Capstone Project will allow you to integrate concepts and tools from the entire Career Brand Management specialization to effectively manage your career brand and increase personal effectiveness. Some unique program highlights: • The Capstone Project is designed as a virtual training and development facility where you will engage in career investigation research, self-audit, and creating evidence-based portfolios, professional development plans, self-marketing and personal branding strategies, presentations, and public profiles; • You’ll be actively working with your cohort (study group members) to review their work and receive peer feedback; • You may also use the Capstone as a “career fitness gym” and work independently on a project where you will share your results with others and receive peer feedback. Examples of these projects include but are not limited to developing a self-marketing plan, creating a new digital artifact, developing communication strategy, working on a job application, creating a selection criteria statement, and looking for best practices and self-assessment tools; • It is completely self-paced; you may want to either do it as a 4-week course, or focus and complete in just 3-4 days. Overall, the Capstone Project will help you organize yourself, fine tune your self-management information system, provide a framework for strategic self-management, and serve as an effective self-coaching support system. In the end, you will be well positioned to succeed in the marketplace as the CEO of your own career!