Recently completed two online courses and would like to share a few of my learnings.
Course: “Introduction to Personal Branding“
With the shift to the digital world, it is becoming a necessity to promote ourselves digitally and often termed as “Personal Branding”. In short, it is a way to promote ourself which includes our experiences, the combinations of skills, personality, and vision. It is all about telling our story that reflects our actions, attitude, and so on. Personal branding gives us an opportunity to control how people see us and it is very beneficial professionally. Preferably Social media sites or professional networking sites should be a few platforms to promote yourselves where the audience can see you. Consistency and Authenticity should be important while building your personal brand. It is important to keep in mind that your personal branding matches what people say about you. For e.g. if you believe it is important to lift others to get lifted, it should reflect in your branding. I would like to share a few tips which I learned to make a better personal brand:
- Introspection and self-reflection: ensure that you know your audience.
- Find yourself, directors, or mentors. Good guidance never hurts.
- Personality Test: to help you with a better understanding of yourself.
- Align your personal values and skills.
Lastly, it is always a good idea to learn and apply. There are many courses on personal branding and can be accessed through various learning platforms. I did a course on “Coursera” called “Introduction to Personal Branding“. Keep upgrading and keep an open mind to adapt to the changing world.
Course: “Circular Economy: An Introduction“
Our current economy called Linear Economy is all about “Take-Make-Use-Dispose”, which is not a sustainable model. The reason behind not being sustainable is that resources like fossil fuels, food, and water are increasingly hard to get. Biodiversity is declining worldwide and the linear economy depends on cheap energy, cheap materials, and cheap credit. On the other hand, the Circular Economy aims to radically limit the extraction of raw materials and the production of waste. The basic idea of circular economy is to recover and reuse as many of the products and materials as possible, Inna systematic way, over and over again. The circular economy is based on four basic principles:
- Waste = Food
- Build resilience through diversity
- Use energy from renewable resources
- Think in systems.
The circular economy can be easily understood by a diagram called Butterfly Diagram. The butterfly diagram represents the flows of products and materials in the circular economy. It has two sides called Biological materials, that is materials that can be safely returned to the biosphere and value to the environment once they have gone through one or more use cycles. And Technical materials, materials that cannot be returned to the biosphere, should continuously cycle through the system so that their value can be (re)captured.
For businesses to close the loop, three main business processes are useful: acquisition, reprocessing and remarketing. Along with these processes, it is very important to have a value, often termed as “Business value in the circular economy”. The list of these values includes Sourcing value, environmental value, customer value, and information value. Though it is important to have these values and processes integrated into a business, it is a good idea to revise the business model as well. We can distinguish three different categories of product-service business models:
- Product-oriented
- Use-oriented
- Result-oriented.
Offering services in combination with products is a way to add value without using more materials.
Other than the concepts or discussions above, there are many other areas like remanufacturing, how product life extension helps reach circularity and how repairing plays an important role in the field of the circular economy. I did my course in Circular Economy called “Circular Economy: An Introduction“. It is very well structured to give a brief understanding of the concepts. Since it is an online course, it should be helpful to integrate it into your personal learning environment. Keep learning and do share your point of view on the circular economy.
