Hello Career Builder!
I assume that you are a working professional looking to enhance your current job, get a promotion, or even change your career. We expect that you have already identified a range of skills that you will need to master to achieve your next career goal. Well done!
As a busy professional, you have no time to waste. You probably know that in the corporate world, managers use Talent Management to develop their employees and gain a competitive advantage on the market. There are various tools and techniques, such as competency dashboards and skills matrices, that help companies to get skilled. As an individual, you can use a similar approach for managing and developing your skills portfolio to excel in a competitive job market. Think about it as gaining a master skill, the skill to get skilled.
Mastering Skills Management is what you need to do to effectively organize and direct your skill-building activities in a highly competitive environment. It will help you objectively evaluate your skillset for any particular position and estimate your likely ranking in the job competition. It will also tell you how much of each skill you will need to beat the competition. And it will also help you monitor the levels of skill acquisition to guide your professional development.
The first of the above books, “Self-Management and Self-Marketing”, was first published in 2015. This is a companion book for a popular course that I teach for senior undergraduate students at the State University of New York’s Empire State College. In 2016, the course was converted into a series of MOOCs (massive open online courses) and offered on Coursera®. Currently, there are four courses in the “Career Brand Management” Specialization (https://www.coursera.org/specializations/career-brand-management). In the first two years since its launch, more than 60,000 learners from around the globe enrolled in these courses. Most of the learners have already completed bachelor’s (40%) and even master’s degrees (38%). According to the end-of-course surveys, learners find our specialization useful and helpful for self-organization.
The second book is written to accompany the new course to be launched Coursera® in May 2018 (https://coursera.org/learn/skills-management). This brief course will provide learners with powerful techniques for evidence-based, data-driven, and externally-verified skills assessment. You will learn how to use hands-on, self-coaching tools, such as competency dashboards, estimated total skillset scores, and skillset checklist summaries. Additionally, the course will provide you with tangible outcomes for immediate use. We’ll show you how to implement individual skills management techniques to enhance your Functional Resume and generate a powerful Selection Criteria Statement. Overall, by mastering Individual Skills Management, you will lay out a solid strategic foundation for your long-term career success. It’s like having a roadmap and a GPS, where at any given moment it will tell you where you are with your skills, where you want to be and how to get there.
I hope to see you in our courses!
Professor Valeri Chukhlomin
Saratoga Springs, New York