Module 2
Self-Assessment and Goal Setting
Everyone talks of self-assessment differently. This second Module aims to identify who you are and what you know. Are the skills Transferrable, and how do you tell?
Skill and Benefits - Your Path to Success
This second module aims to get you seriously thinking about your next move.
For example, You may have spent the last few years creating learning modules for courses in one or several fields. But how much have you considered what other roles around you could be filled with the same skills?
Have you considered what skills you have and what you do best? Where else can those skills be deployed, and what value can you bring with those skills?
You will hamper your chances if the only roles you search for are in one area, such as Learning Designer, Instructional Designer, or eLearning Designer, where your skills are transferable to any other roles in both Marketing and Design.
You must follow a strategy to effectively showcase your skills and the benefits of employing you on your CV/Resume and other documents. Employers today give information to recruiters to search against. It will contain a list of skills. You will never meet all those listed, but how can you show that what you have is valuable?
If you have Premium on LinkedIn, you will have seen a list of skills requirements when applying for a role and the skills other people who applied have over and above the list the recruiter posted. Give it some thought if they are searching and find people with all ten skills listed, and you only have five of them whose names are at the top of the pile?
Of course, it is impossible to keep editing your skills list on LinkedIn to match the role. If you are playing this game, you are putting your effort into the wrong place.
There are a couple of alternative ways to achieve this.
Alongside your CV/Resume, create a new document called Skills and Benefits.
Here is a template you can use: https://bit.ly/3ZayMdF.
Here is an alternative template already filled out with lots more information. The names have been changed. https://bit.ly/4ippOSy
I'm sorry, but this is not a five-minute exercise; it may take a day or even longer to get right. You do not have to use these templates.
Highlight Relevant Skills
Carefully review the job description and identify the skills the employer is seeking. Include these skills in the first column of the document, using the same terminology as the job advert. Focus on the most relevant complex (technical) and soft (interpersonal) skills.
Where Did You Use Your Skills
In the second column, note in which role you used these skills. The potential employer can use this later if they seek a particular reference. Or may focus on one of these in an interview. Be honest at every stage of this process, don't add skills you are not expert at, it will come back to catch you later.
Demonstration of Benefits
To be honest, this column should be better named Value, but you need to show the benefit's value as a demonstration of the benefit—a slightly softer approach. How, you may ask, do you show value? You probably cannot put an exact £/$ value on one of your skills, but use it if you have a good story to back up your calculation. For example, Skill: Team Management -- Company: ACME Corporation -- Demonstration: Reducing time to market by reorganising three teams into one, cross-training them, and reducing the time of delivery for customer training materials from GA+100 days to GA-7days helped to reduce churn by 1%. Value £1.43m. Back story if asked. Sales in the current year are projected to hit £650m with a gross profit of 22%. Reduced churn equal to £1.4m of retained profit.
Start thinking of yourself as a valuable asset to the company. Every company seeks a minimum return on investment of 10 times your gross cost: your salary plus National Insurance payments, matched pensions, and all other benefits.
Creating this document to send along with your CV/Resume will make interesting reading to your potential interviewer and will help you rise to the top of the pile.
Create a Dedicated Skills Section in your CV with bullet points describing the skills and a note saying, "See attached Skills and benefits document."
Set some goals and make a plan of action.
We all have been there: an appraisal meeting at work, where first, you were given a set of questions in the HR system that asked you to write your goals, whether you achieved them, and what your goals for the next year were. Bet you hated this every time you had to do it.
Then nobody read it, and someone worked out your bonus for the year based on a split of a budget they had to allocate. If you have ever been there, when choosing those for redundancy, no matter how good your appraisal was, it did not seem to make any difference.
However, what you did to fill those boxes is exactly what I want you to do now, except this time, there is a benefit in doing so. This is the plan to focus you on gaining your next role. No ifs or buts, but when it will happen. Not just positive thinking but positive action.
Answer the questions below to start you on the road to considering your next move.
With this exercise, you build a positioning statement, identify your true strengths, and determine the role that best suits your next move. You may have also been through the exercise of creating an elevator pitch when you first joined this group. Does your positioning statement change that elevator pitch? If you have not created an elevator pitch, do to worry; we will cover this in the next module.
What you type in the boxes below will be stored in a cookie on your computer, nothing is sent to the cloud. When you return it will be there to review or change. Print this page for a hard copy.
Stay on track with your plan
Part one of your plan is almost complete. At this stage, you should have formulated what you are good at and what you have done so far that was positive. Don't dwell on the items at the other end of the scale. You need your best positive attitude right now; nobody will get in the way.
Before we run to Module 3, you have one more item to consider. No box to fill in. However, to stay on the plan you are building, you must have a set of small strategies to cope with each of the following:
- Hearing nothing after your application.
- Not getting a response to any email you sent.
- The immediate rejection of the application.
- The recruiter ghosting you after an interview.
- Being told one of any number of responses you consider were biased.
These all will and probably have already happened. One of the live sessions on the weekly chat will discuss coping mechanisms for this. Don't miss the sessions.