Information supplementary to the University of Sydney Writing Hub's Profiling the Professional Self portal.

1. Your Professional Self
What is your professional self-concept?
Who is professional you?

2. Professional competency
Four areas of essential knowledge, skills, and abilities
for professional practitioners in any field are:
1. Communication literacy
2. Personal and professional management
3. Critical thinking and problem-solving
4. Technical literacy
Source and more detail: Wake Forest University, “Professional Development
Competency Model,” professional.opcd.wfu.edu/competency-model/.
Accessed Feb-Apr 2016.

3. Job search reality
Job hunting is:
1. A repeat activity: on average once every three years or so for under 35s.
2. Not always easy. It can be confronting and frustrating. It will require a mixture
of art and science, personal resilience and relational skill, a thick skin, hope,
enthusiasm, openness to the facts and practicalities of competing with others.
3. Mysterious. What looks certain may be a mirage, and what looks like a long
shot, may give you results. Techniques can only offer degrees of likely
success. Nothing works or fails every time.
4. Influenced by luck. Maybe you can increase it. Appreciate it when you see it.
5. Made easier if you are willing to try learn, to something new. You will need to.
Adapted from Bolles, Richard Nelson. What Color is Your Parachute? Ten Speed Press. NY. 2013. p.37.

4. Personal accountability
questions
1.What are your goals for the next one, two, five and ten
years? What about lifetime goals?
2.What goals and plans are you holding yourself
accountable to?
3.How are your results so far against each? (Measure results,
not effort)
4.What reasonable timeframes are you measuring your
results against?
5.Do you manage your time well? How could you improve?

5. Your story defines you
1. An effective story is not a “tall tale”
2. Avoid extremes: safe, “dull and unremarkable”
versus “random, accidental, unmotivated”
3. “Continuity and causality” make your career
transition narrative coherent. The propelling sense
of forward motion has “dramatic appeal”, in spite
of “discontinuity and tension”
Next slide: making your story coherent
Ibarra, H. and Lineback, K. cite linguist Charlotte Linde in “What’s Your Story.” Harvard
Business Review on Managing Yourself. Harvard, Boston. 2005. pp.43-61.

6. Establish coherence
1. Grounding your rationale for change in your character (i.e.
explaining why you have done what you have, in a reasonable
way), adds explanatory force
2. Adding personal and professional reasons multiplies
comprehension
3. Anchoring rationale further back in time looks better than
having made a recent (potentially hasty) decision
4. Reinterpret and reframe past events in current light
5. Make use of plot archetypes: coming-of-age and maturation to
show personal education and insight
Ibarra, H. and Lineback, K. cite linguist Charlotte Linde in “What’s Your Story.” Harvard
Business Review on Managing Yourself. Harvard, Boston. 2005. pp.43-61.

7. Tell different stories
1. While you’re working out what your new direction
might be, you might have to tell different stories
about your career hopes to different audiences
(without lying). Select and articulate aspects
relevant to exploring particular options. Strip out
irrelevant details that bog the story down.
2. Tell and retell your story, to increase your comfort
in telling it, as well as to learn from other people’s
responses to your story.

8. Key story elements
1. You are a protagonist, only if your audience cares enough about
you. Why should others care?
2. Something must move or propel you to act or change. What is it?
3. What is the obstacle, frustration, conflict or difficulty in your
journey, you are willing to reveal?
4. What was or will be your career’s turning point or epiphany?
5. How would you like your story to resolve?
6. How will you increase your chances that your story will resolve in
the way you desire?

9. DOTS career planning
model
D: Decision Learning
O: Opportunity Awareness
T: Transition Learning
S: Self Awareness
Source and more information: Law, Bill and Watts, Tony. “The DOTS
ANALYSIS” (original version). National Institute for Careers Education
and Counselling. 1997-96. www.hihohiho.com/memory/cafdots.pdf.