Qualifications/Experience

Details: Expertise - EQF Level 3

Start
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When selecting the applicants, human resources managers and recruiters only have a couple of minutes to decide whether they want to get to know you or not. Decisive factors are, among others, your qualifications and your professional and personal experience, the resulting competences and their presentation. For this reason it´s worth to start reflecting and discovering these points in your personal and professional life. The following questions will help you to deepen your self-knowledge, take the best decisions while planning your career and present yourself the best way:

Who are you?
To perfect your self-knowledge it is essential to recall your biographic information related with education, professional and personal background.
What can you do?
The next step is to analyse the skills and competences you gathered through education, work experience and personal life, and the resulting professional options.
What do you want to work with?
Finally, reflecting on your work values and expectations to your future work place and professional life helps to plan your job search.

Task

Konzept
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The idea of this module´s task is to analyse deeply all your personal and professional assets that can help your career planning and to become fully aware of what you expect from your professional future. To complete the picture it consists of both, self-assessment and external assessment. The external assessment can show you unknown aspects, confirm results of your self-assessment, give you new ideas for your career planning, and simply increase motivation and self-confidence.
The base of the analysis is your biography considering your personal life, your education, your vocational training and all the experience you gathered in work and other activities.
Gaining a deep knowledge of your qualifications and experience and the resulting competences allows you to focus on your career planning more efficiently and target-orientated.

Process

First of all go through the exercises 1-3:

Exercise 1 – Who are you?

Fill in the form your biographic information that is related to your education, professional and personal history.
Think about how these details will influence your job search and career planning.

Exercise 2 – What can you do?

Go through the points and questions of this exercise and take notes to all the formal and informal competences you gained in vet, work, other activities and personal life.
Get together with a partner and present him/her the competences you gained, where and how you gained them.
Your partner will take notes of the most important/impressive competences and will share his impressions, questions etc.

Exercise 3 – What do you want to work with?

Read the list of values and rank them (5 is highest, 1 lowest).
Choose first the 10 highest ranked values and then, out of those, the 5 most important and order them according to their importance.
Get together with your partner and present your 5 most important values. Explain why you have chosen these and discuss how the importance of these 5 values could influence your career planning.

After going through these 3 exercises, analysing your biography, the competences you gained and the things that are important for you in your future work place you gathered quite a lot of self-knowledge. To get an objective picture of the situation an external assessment could be helpful. Together with your partner you will try to give each other an objective and realistic outside view. Try to give your partner a short but precise statement of what you see as his/her most important assets concerning education, experience and competences. Thinking about these points and the expectations your partner has concerning work values, how do you see his/her future career? Where do you locate his opportunities? What do you recommend your partner?

After you gave your statement and recommendations, it´s your partner´s turn.

Conclusion

Congratulations!
You have analysed your past and your personality, you gained a deep knowledge about yourself, your skills, experiences and competences and you know what you are looking for. You are prepared to start a new stage in your career planning.

Evaluation

He/she is able to explain his/her educational, professional and personal biography.
He/she is able to describe his/her qualifications, experiences and resulting competences.
He/she is able to describe the characteristics of an ideal work place.
He/she is able to analyse his/her CV and personal past.
He/she is able to analyse his/her qualifications, experiences and competences.
He/she is able to develop a realistic career plan.
He/she is able to set-up a ‘perfect’ concept of self-presentation for the job search.
He/she is able to reflect on his/her qualifications and competences and plan specific steps of improvement.
He/she is able to synthesize his/her expectations and realistic opportunities.
For a full description of ECVET, Skills, Competence and Knowledge for this module see Methodolgy Handbook and Competence Matrix