The Personal Business Model, proposed by Tim Clark and Alexander Osterwalder in 2012, is a professional development matrix, which allows you to precisely describe the work situation in which you are currently and/or the one in which you want to project yourself.
This tool, proposed as part of the Assessment 5.3thus allows everyone to describe their personal “business model” and to think about his evolution career.
How to visualize your professional activity?
The Personal Business Model is a matrix which visually represents your professional activity, by summarizing on one page the nine key components from your current position.
This is an exercise in qualitative analysis of your job (or the last job you held). This matrix helps you describe the work situation you currently find yourself in.
You are going to fill out a table that has nine distinct boxes. These boxes will allow you to observe your job from all angles at once. You will be able to distinguish what you like about your current job and what you hate most of all.
Here is the detail of the nine boxes to fill in the model that we invite you to download :
Who works with you?
Your key partners are the people who support you and help you accomplish your work: your colleagues, those around you, suppliers, subcontractors, etc.
What are you doing ?
Your key activities are the essential tasks that you accomplish on a daily basis.
Who are you and what do you have?
Your key resources are those that characterize you, that is to say the means at your disposal such as your personality, your skills (studies, training, etc.) and your centers of interest.
How do you help?
Your value proposition is what you bring to others so that they can accomplish their tasks. Why do your customers call on you? What advantages do you have compared to others, competitors or colleagues?

How do they know you and how do you deliver to them?
Your distribution channels are the means you use to communicate with your customers, colleagues and provide them with the value you bring (email, social networks, telephone, face to face, etc.)?
How do you interact?
The customer relationship defines the type of exchanges you have with your customers? Is it a relationship of trust, loyalty, or a unique service?
Who are you helping?
Who is your persona (or target customer)? Who are you creating value for? It could be your colleagues who need you to accomplish their own tasks, companies or people who use what you make (your product or service).
What do you give?
What does it cost you to do this work in terms of time, travel, energy, stress, etc. And what do you have to give up to accomplish it (family or personal time, etc.).
What do you get?
What do you get in exchange for your work in terms of income and benefits, but also in terms of recognition, personal satisfaction, commitment…
The ultimate professional development tool
Once your table is completed and you have conscientiously validated it, you can move on to the second part of the exercise (which can also be found on the document to download). This is a second table which will help you sort between the different elements that you noted in the first.
Beyond the description of the current elements of your professional activity, this framework allows you to carry out a critical analysis of the different components by considering, for each, what you would like to maintain, strengthen, add, reduce or delete.
You will thus identify what precisely you want to change. It is the foundation of your professional development or the adjustments you wish to make…
For example, you realize that what weighs you down the most in your current job is the number of emails you receive every day because you prefer to communicate by phone. Or you may notice that what mainly poses a problem for you is not the function and the tasks to be performed but rather your unpleasant relationships with the people to whom you provide this service…
You can then build one (or more) prototype of your target Personal Business Model, concretely describing the planned changes and their impact for each of the components. At this stage, this new model meeting your aspirations is based in part on hypotheses that will need to be tested and verified, by implementing, for example, a network approach.