What is professional credibility? Does it have the same impact on your career as financial credit reports have on your personal finances?
Credit bureaus calculate financial credit ratings for citizens. Financial institutions and insurance technology startup companies have their proprietary ways to calculate personal risks using information gathered from their tax cards or phone numbers. Consumer products have credit scores based on the review by customers.
Ever wondered about rating professional skills or how to build professional credibility? A professional is the utmost important asset to an organization, and the service provided by the professional forms a critical part of the contribution to GDP. The short answer is a No until now.
However, a startup named getCREDIBLE has invented a technical solution to solve the challenge of professional ratings, and it can be a game-changer in the industry. It is a complex process as we need to tackle various dimensions like soft skills, hard skills, willingness to offer help, ego, biased-decision making, etc. The list of processes goes endless between a person providing services and a person consuming services.
There are three ratings from getCREDIBLE to rate and build professional credibility and effectiveness.
- Professional Credibility (ProCred)
- Professional Citizenship (ProCiti)
- Professional Ecosystem (ProECO)
Core Principles
As discussed, rating a professional’s credibility or work effectiveness is more complex than a financial credit score.
To provide a glimpse into the complexity, let us pick a human characteristic, human bias, and ego for reference. Professionals can sometimes deliver inferior service to a consumer intentionally because of rivalry or better services because of friendship. In the same way, a consumer can give very high or poor professional ratings irrespective of the quality of service, just because of professional ego, rivalry, or friendship.
getCREDIBLE utilizes the following core principles to solve such challenges and complexities of professional ratings and help you build professional credibility.
Anonymous
Keep all feedback anonymous to trigger genuineness in the feedback and rating process. It is an important criterion to avoid human bias on feedback. What prevents users from giving genuine feedback is the fear of repercussions and the chance of facing the person in the future. Not giving realistic feedback denies the opportunity for a professional to improve his skills, capabilities, and credibility for the future.
Involve all stakeholders
It is also common to get selective feedback from friends and allies. It will skew the ratings to the wrong side and ruin the authenticity of the rating system. Therefore, you must collect feedback from stakeholders, peers, and partners for the professional credibility ratings.
Unsolicited
You must have an automated and unsolicited feedback collection process to capture realistic and genuine feedback. We must avoid solicitation at any cost. Solicitation is reciprocal with direct human influence - 'You give me good feedback, and I will give you good feedback in return.''
Continuous
Humans are a creative species that learn continuously and improve organically by nature. It is why we consider a professional with ten years of experience more valuable than someone with two years of experience. To demonstrate the scope of improvement, new skills, and enhancement of professional credibility, we need a continuous feedback management system like getCRDIBLE.
Open format
Traditional feedback forms and survey forms often create a hindrance to proper feedback. In such cases, the survey questions and feedback forms are created to capture only favorable responses and rule out negative feedback. To get the best response rates, getCREDIBLE uses an open format where users can mark their feedback in an English sentence without boundaries and biases.
Professional Ratings
The three rating systems from getCREDIBLE provide in-depth insights into professional credibility in multiple dimensions.
- Ability to administer/handle responsibilities
- Willingness and ability to help colleagues/peers
- The size and quality of the professional ecosystem
ProCred
ProCred stands for professional credibility, and it defines the effectiveness of the professionals based on the feedback collected from their professional ecosystem. It indicates how well this professional has been completing his core responsibilities. This rating is calculated typically every month. However, we can do it bi-weekly if needed.
ProCiti
ProCiti stands for professional citizenship, and it defines the effectiveness of the professional in helping others by providing accurate and timely feedback. For an organization to be successful, colleagues need to help each other. Being a good team player will increase the synergy of the entire team. ProCiti is a good indicator of this professional cooperation.
ProEco
ProEco stands for Professional Ecosystem that includes the managers, peers, partners, customers, and team members of an employee. getCREDIBLE computes ProCred and ProCiti from the feedback from the people in the ProEco family. A good size ProEco model with a high confidence rating adds to the weightage of the above two ratings and helps build professional credibility.
Best practices to maintain good ratings
I am sure you are thinking about how these three ratings work. The logic is pretty complicated. However, follow these simple steps to reach your desired rating level and maintain it at that level. Maintaining a good rating will help you dominate during the appraisal conversations with your manager, or it will help you to stand out from others during a job hunt.
getCREDIBLE will prompt you with alerts and notifications for the tasks, making it easier for you to progress gradually and maintain a high rating. It may consume only 15 minutes of your time per week to post your milestone, request for ratings, and submit all your feedback.
ProCred best practice
- Be consistent with a two to four weeks frequency to post your milestone.
- Include all elements of the milestone - completed data, skills used, contributor type, scope, etc.
ProCiti best practice
- Provide a timeframe for feedback on all incoming milestones. It will impact your frequency.
- Provide true feedback based on incoming milestones without bias. It will impact your accuracy. Delivering biased feedback will affect rating accuracy and trigger negativity.
ProEco best practice
- Include as many people in your ecosystem into your professional activities.
- Take care to fix any ambers and reds in your ProEco model to maintain a high confidence percentage.
Increasing your Visibility
Once you have used the above practices to establish your professional credibility, the next step is to make it visible to your professional network. Share it with a broader audience such as recruiters, former colleagues, hiring managers, and peers to increase the probability of landing your next dream job. For this purpose, you can leverage different social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others.
getCREDIBLE offers digital profiles for professionals that can be easily shared. However, you can also make use of the below features
- Short URLs – Create short URLs of your digital profile in one click, and share them on your social media handles.
- Digital badge – Create a badge for milestone changes like acquiring new skills, increasing proficiency levels of existing skills, etc.
You can use both short URLs and Digital badges to share your digital profile with a single click on your various social media channels.
In addition, you also have detailed analytics on page view, location, viewer profile, and visit duration to help you make informed decisions to increase the visibility of your digital profile and build professional credibility.