Tell us about the certification you earned and how it has helped your career.

I graduated from the Talent Management Specialist program last March. The certification program has been beneficial to my current work and in securing jobs in the field of Talent Management.
 
How have the learning modules shaped your thinking and your achievements at work?

I experienced a smooth transition from acquiring skills from the program and with applying them to my current work as an educator. For example, the performance management segment of the program provided me with tools for nurturing the academic development of the students that I worked with by helping me create step by step roadmaps to help them reach their personalized goals. I accomplished this by helping students appraise their current standings with their completed assignments and then coaching them in understanding how their deficits affected their performance on the material that they were being asked to complete. One way the program helped me improve this process is by setting SMART goals with the students such that they knew the specific grade that they wanted to receive, how their desired grade was going to be measured, being aware that they are capable of attaining their goal, realizing that the pathway to improving their deficits is relevant to their success, and that they are bound by the period of time between receiving their assignments and the due date for those assignments. By pairing SMART goals with the performance management process of holding on going conversations of how they were able to improve their work and paired with the objective standards of what is expected of their work quality, the students better understood what was asked of them and how they could meet those expectations to achieve their goals by watching their grades improve from the previous assignment to their latest assignment grade. Not only did the program help improve my current work, it also helped me secure jobs in the field of Talent Management.

How has your CTMS certification helped in securing a job?

A few months after I completing the program, I obtained a job as a Hiring Committee Chair for a non-profit in Berkeley, CA. I was able to obtain this job by utilizing the skills that I gained from the certification program during the interview for the position by asking the interviewers about their current Talent Management framework and suggesting possible evidence-based alternatives that could improve their organization. During the interview, the questions that I was asking were influenced by the questions at the end of the unit assignments in which we interviewed professionals in organizations to assess where their talent management system is at and then utilizing that information to derive evidence-based alternatives that could improve the organization. I was able to accomplish this by asking about their employee selection process that is a key component of the job that I was interviewing for. After doing this, I realized that they were lacking a Realistic Job Preview Component and then I explained how by utilizing this tool they could improve their employee retention rates.
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How has HCG’s evidence-based curriculum and learning approach shaped your career choices? 

I stayed in the Hiring Committee Chair position for a few months before I realized that I had my own ideas about how contemporary Talent Management systems could be further progressed. This led me to leave this position and to join a research lab at the University of California, Berkeley so that I could further my understanding of the research process so that I could be able to produce evidence to either support or oppose that what I would think could improve organizations. ​​