Hello again. Welcome to day three of the retreat. Today's theme is strategic planning. This is where we would like to ask you to collect and review all of the documents related to strategic planning that you have developed in the specialization. We expect that by now, you must have worked on quite a number of documents including in Course 1, my career goals and future work self. A C.E.O. of EnerpriseYOU. In Course 2, SWOT analysis and 360 degree self-assessment. In Course 3, self-marketing plan and personal branding plan. Do you have those documents ready? If you do the good job on yourself management information system, you should be able to retrieve them in no time. If not, this is the time to reorganize it. For example, you may want to create a sub-folder called My Strategic Plans and keep your strategic plans there. Once you get those documents ready you are well prepared to develop a comprehensive professional development plan for the year. We want you to think about your real needs and priorities, and identify as few as two to three, or as many as eight to ten skill branding and career branding activities that you can realistically complete during the year. Then we'd like to ask you about how you're going to accomplish this school. Set up milestones and the desired outcomes. If you go on a strategic retreat once a year, it shouldn't take longer than a day, perhaps as little as a few hours, to go through strategic exercises and come up with a professional development plan for the year. If you're working on a professional development plan for the first time, it makes sense to spend some time learning how to do it. In Module 4, there's a video called, What's Next? Field Experience Tasks. One of the tasks is called professional development plan. You may want to add it to the list of activities for the year. When you go on a strategic retreat next year your day three will be dedicated to working on strategic planning exercises and developing a comprehensive professional development plan for the year. To do so you're probably need to review some of the career development lab and the content lectures in courses one, two and three dealing with developmental strategic plans. But today we're in a different situation as we assumed that you have recently taken courses one, two and three in the specialization and completed all other strategic plans. In this, you are almost ready to move to day 4 of the retreat which is dedicated to feel the experiences and reflection. But before you move to day 4, we'd like to take some time to focus on your ability to develop and implement strategic plans in real life. There are three aspects of self-developmental work that we'd like to address in this module. Those aspects are the use of self-coaching tools and techniques, the effectiveness and sustainability of self strategy. Your mastery in developing and implementing communication strategies to showcase your digital artifacts. You cannot accomplish much in any professional area without learning how to use tools and techniques. The very same thing can be said about career branding and development. In this specialization, we devoted a very significant amount of time to discussing various self-coaching instruments and how they can help developing and promoting marketable skills. This time, we're going to review the use of the tools with a focus on developing and implementing a personal strategy. Then, we'd like to discuss the effectiveness of your approach to self-strategy. Particularly, we will focus on your ability to sustain a strategy and translate it into daily routines. The problem of sustaining strategy is well know in the business world. It is worth the exploring and a personal strategy setting as well. Finally, we think that it is likely that you will include working soft promotion inter-professional development plan. This is a critically important component of your personal strategy. As we mentioned in the course, there is not much value in your skills if you cannot promote them and put them to use. As a practical application of your strategic skills, we'd like to ask you to work on creating and implementing an effective communication strategy for the digital artifact that you developed in module two. You will work on this task then provide a report for peer evaluation and also evaluate the work of other students. That is our plan for the day. Now let's go back to self-coaching tools. This is the corner stone of our approach to career development. To excel in the competitive race you should be able to objectively evaluate your performance, set up goals, find direction, measure results and monitor your progress. For all of these you'll need to use self-coaching tools and techniques. In a specialization, we compared career development with physical exercises and advocate for the use of career development labs. If you think about it and compare the setup of other complex activities that require training and development, such as gymnasia for physical activities or installations for serious military games. You'll see that all of those establishments tried to mimic the kind of battlefields for which they're trying to train people. For example a training lab for astronauts looks like a space station. So what should a career development lab look like? What is the battlefield in this case? In our opinion, as the central idea of the specialization is to help career developers to navigate and excel in highly volatile and competitive job environments, we decided to model the career development lab in this specialization on the competitive, skill based job selection. You may think about it as a kind of simulated training environment like in The Matrix. Well, maybe our lab doesn't look that cool, that's the one in the movie does. But the idea is the same, to excel and succeed one needs to play a very serious game in a highly realistic setting. The basic setup of the lab is explained in courses one and two. The idea is to model a competitive job selection where you are required to respond to a number of selection criteria and demonstrate your mastery in required areas. The lab itself is a major self coaching tool in the course. Another self coaching tool is a self information management system that is used for observation, recording results, and monitoring. We reviewed this tool in the previous module. In the real world, the results of competitive selection are usually presented in a selection scoring chart where all required competencies, capabilities and experiences are lined up and measured against benchmarks of the competition. The same approach is used in a series of dashboards that we use in the course as a measuring self-coaching tool. In each of the three courses, there's at least one dashboard that is used for different purposes. In course one, we used it to model competitive selection, and help you prepare a powerful selection criteria statement. In course two, we used it to help identify your true strengths and weaknesses. Setting priorities for professional development and controlling the results of skill-building activities. In course three, we transformed it from measuring career brand equity and directing your self-marketing and personal branding activities. In the specialization, we introduced two metrics that are based on the dashboard And can help developing and promoting your skills. One is called your current job market value and the other one is called your career brand equity. Using metrics is supposed to make your CDL activities data-driven and accountable. There is a broad range of other supplementary tools that are used to build the dashboard and make it accurate. In the specialization, we introduced them in CDL activities and provided examples of how to use them. Those tools include multiple templates, portfolios, and worksheets. Here is a map of the self coaching tools that we used in the specialization. Some of the tools are often used in career developing literature such as a SWOT analysis. We think that this is a great tool but unfortunately it is often misunderstood and misuse. That's why we provided examples how can be misuse and misinterpret it and how you should approach it to get more accurate results. Some tools are well described in the literature and self-help resources. For example, a learning journal or an e-portfolio so we incorporated those tools into lectures and exercises. Some tools are well known but not often used by career developers, for example, self-assessment rubrics. So we not only incorporated them but we also provided further readings. Finally some ideas like using role models for inspiration and understanding the best practices are commonly used but usually not presented as tools. In this cases we presented those approaches and ideas as tools and invented new terms such as the T-Portfolio. Overall, we would like to hear from you if the idea of working regularly in the lab and using tools works for you, helps you organize yourself, monitors your progress, and as a result, gets better results and career development. We think that if you practice often, you should be able to reach your goals. We also think that it might be a good idea to include a couple of new tools in your professional development plan for the year and try to master them. If it works well for you it would be great if you could record your observations in the How to Contribute section in Module 4. This way you'll know the tool better and will help others. After all this is an example of a digital artifact that you can create and develop a sound communications strategy to promote your skills. Have a very productive rest of your day.
