Hello again. I'm Amy Giocalli. Welcome to day two of the retreat. Today's theme is the self-audit. This is where we would like to ask you to collect and review all results of your self-auditing exercises from the entire specialization. You did quite a lot of them. Here's a list. Please make sure that you have them all completed. In course 1, you were able to identify your portable skills portfolio, career self-management competencies and gaps, personality traits, self-controls and self-directed learning skills, as well as your career goals and future work self. In course two you work on your self-assessment skills, skill building skills, SWOT analysis and a 360 degree self-assessment. In course 3, you conducted a self-marketing audit. When you go on a retreat next year, you'll probably want to repeat at least some of the self-auditing exercises. To do so, there's no need to retake all three courses in specialization but you may still benefit from reviewing the career development lab activities and the content videos in those courses before conducting self-audits. This time, we assume that you have just completed all of the exercises and courses one, two, and three, and have your self-auditing results ready for review. In this case, the next step will be to move to day three of the retreat which is dedicated to making sense of the self-audit and figuring out where you are suppose to engage in strategic planning for the year to come. But before you move to day three, we'd like to take some time to review the effectiveness of your self-developmental and self-promotional work. There are three particular aspects of it that we would like to focus on in this module. These aspects are the use of your self-management information system, the effectiveness of peer review assessment and peer feedback, and your mastery in documenting your skills. You may ask yourself why you need this. How are these related to self-audits? Here’s our rationale. First, your self-management information system. You may think about it as a self-audit of your organizational skills. This is a very important and highly practical application of self-management theory because if you cannot organize and keep track of your activities, you can hardly be in control of your self-development to work. We did talk about the need to setup an effective self-management information system and the specialization, and provide it some recommendations. Now, is the time to review it and share your observations. We added a lecture on peer review, because peer assessment is often the only available feedback that a career developer can get in real time. How could we make it useful, valuable, and functional. We covered this subject in some detail in course two, when we discussed self-assessment. But it makes sense to talk more about it during the retreat where you can actually work with your cohort in real time. Finally, we included a lecture and an assignment devoted to developing a digital artifact during the retreat because by engaging in a highly practical application of your self-developmental work, you can see that these tools actually work. If you do your self-audits correctly, you will see how you can better develop and articulate your marketable skills. Now, let's go back to your self-management information system. To begin, what is a self-management information system? Why does one need it? And how does one organize it scientifically? In a way, most people have a self-management information system in a form of some notes, records, a diary, etc. Of course, in the digital age, these notes become digitized and stored. To figure out how to use the power of information technology to help solve out developmental work, we can take a look at how companies used the information system to perform strategic management, marketing or human resource development functions. In the business world, management information systems are very heavily used and are becoming highly specialized. Even ten years ago, one could easily get by with learning the foundation of management information systems. These days, there are highly specialized information system in practically every functional area of business including accounting, information systems, human resource information systems, marketing information systems, and so on. You may ask rather you should wait until a new scientific self-management information system appears on the market. We touch on the subject in course two. Where we contemplated the power of personal analytics and discussed the quantified self-movement. In a nutshell, it's not easy to develop a unified system that serves everyone regardless of their individual differences. But we'll certainly see more of it in the future. In the meantime, in the specialization, we chose to only discuss the principles of self-management information systems and how they can be used by career developers in their every day lives. A self-management information system is simply a way to organize your personal records so as to allow you to monitor your self-developmental work. It can be done in an old fashioned paper based form. Also it can be partially or fully digitized. To be practical, it must allow easy access entering and retrieving of data. Ideally, it should allow you to analyze the data use self-developmental or self-coaching tools and present results in a meaningful and useful way. For example, by generating selection criteria statements, resumes, personal profiles, etc. In course one, we recommended a very simple approach to building your self-management information system by creating three folders on your computer or on the cloud, which include materials designated as input, processing, and output. Input included external materials like job advertisings, resources, good examples, assessment and self-assessment tools, peer reviews, etc. Processing included internally generated materials like your analysis, self-audits, self-assessments, etc. And output, included the documents that you prepare for sharing and external use such as job applications, websites, public profiles, professional development plans, and the like. At this point, we'd like to ask you about your experience in setting up your self-management information system. Was it easy? How did you do it? How did you further organize your folders? Was it useful for self-organization? The next question is, what do you do with it? Did you set it up and forget it? How many self-audits did you do? Where do you record the results? Did you link them to outputs? Finally, what are your thoughts about improving and further customizing it for your needs? If you deal with the information systems in any specialized field what would you recommend based on your professional experience? Conducting an audit of your self-management information system is part of the comprehensive self-audit. Its goal is to increase the effectiveness of self-developmental work. In addition to the questions that we just asked you, you may also consider the overall usefulness of the system for your ongoing professional development. Realistically, it maybe very hard to sustain this kind of effort during the year. It's like a New Year's resolution. It's better not to go to the gym in early January, because that's usually gets too crowded there, for a little while. Maybe important to setup very realistic expectations about using your self-management information system during the year. Enjoy.
