Donna Carroll

I have learned to modify my coaching style to elicit more student participation in creating solutions.  By asking students more about their goals and working cooperatively with them to explore solutions, I hope to teach them two things: how to be resourceful, and how to think of potential solutions on their own (with some assistance and guidance). This is in contrast to what I mistakenly believed I should be when I started working in this position: an authoritative expert.

I learned several strategies for digital career-marketing, which coupled nicely with my previous course on personal branding.

I learned some techniques to truly get students to understand the necessity of maintaining a positive online presence rather than a negative, neutral, or even absent digital footprint.

From this module, I re-learned the fundamentals of outbound and inbound marketing and how to relate it to career marketing for students.  Having spent almost all of my professional career driven by KPIs, this lesson re-framed it in a way that I can teach it to students, again, as it relates specifically to career marketing efforts.

From this module, I learned about some of the more recent trends in employers' consideration of candidates, such as requesting them to complete challenges rather than focusing on their resume.  While this is an interesting approach and definitely provides more focus on a candidate's aptitude in certain domains, especially adaptability and analytical skills, it removes the focus on past performance as a predictor of future performance.  In the right setting, this may be useful and I will share the information with students to be aware of such trends.

From this module, I have learned many ways to describe and teach personal branding to students.  I have always practiced personal branding for myself in my previous business, however, I never knew the formal name or techniques.  I intend to apply these tips and techniques in workshops for college students.

In the segment on Positioning and Communicating Personal Brand, I learned that the first step is to identify your target audience.  Then, you must be able to convey your value to your audience.  You can start out with your personal brand statement and then segue that into an elevator pitch by provide additional details about your "why" and the benefits your target audience can receive.  This all provides YOUR unique story.
 

In this module, I leaned how to conduct a self-analysis and a gap analysis of my personal brand.  The gap analysis is important to understand the differences in how I perceive my personal brand versus how others view my personal brand.  Knowing the gap will guide me in adjusting my personal brand to be more congruent.

I appreciated learning the differences between personal brand and similar (yet different) items such as reputation, image, and online identity.