Personal Branding in Digital Markets runs on a workbook, four assignment briefs, fifteen lecture sessions, and seven thinking tools. The tools are explained here in full and free to use. The workbook, the slides, and the graded briefs stay with enrolled students. This page tells you exactly what each one contains and why the line falls where it does.
Nothing here is hidden to create scarcity. The split follows a single rule: reference material is open, and operating instructions for a graded university course are not.
The seven frameworks, the course architecture, the assessment structure, and two fillable templates. No account, no email, no password. Use them in your own work or your own classroom with attribution.
What the workbook covers week by week and what each assignment brief asks for, described on this page. Enough to judge the course. Not enough to run it.
The full workbook, the fifteen lecture decks, the four assignment briefs, and the grading rubrics with their point level criteria. These are marking instruments, and publishing them would compromise assessment integrity.
A brand is not a mood. It is a set of decisions you can defend. These are the seven tests the course puts to work on a student's own material, week after week. Each is described here completely, because a framework you understand is worth more than a framework you own a copy of.
Most people evaluate a personal brand by impression: it feels professional, it looks consistent, it seems impressive. Impression is unfalsifiable and therefore useless for improvement. Brand Criteria replaces impression with a set of standards you can score against, so that "make it stronger" becomes a specific instruction rather than a feeling. The first act of the course is to establish what a successful personal brand actually consists of, before any student is allowed to build one.
Applied to: every case study and the final presentation
Students arrive already carrying a four letter type and a strong belief in what it means. The course does not ban personality instruments, it locates them. MBTI sorts people into discrete types and has weak test retest reliability. The Five Factor Model measures five traits along continua and holds up considerably better under replication. The point of the comparison is not to declare a winner. It is to establish that a personality instrument describes tendencies, not identity, and that a brand built on a type code is a brand built on a label somebody else wrote for you.
Applied to: the Self Reflection, Week 5
Ask any group to list their values and you will get honesty, integrity, family, growth. Nobody lists the values they actually live by, because stated values are chosen for how they sound. The Cost Test breaks the tie with a single question: has holding this value ever cost you something. Money, a friendship, a grade, a promotion, an easier path. If it has never cost anything, it is not a value, it is a preference wearing a value's clothes. Values that survive the Cost Test are the only ones stable enough to build on, because they have already been tested under pressure and they held.
Applied to: the Values and Principles Framework, and the Self Reflection
Carl Rogers called it congruence: the degree of overlap between the self you actually are and the self you would like to be. Personal branding lives or dies in that overlap. A claim that sits only in the ideal self is aspiration you cannot yet deliver, and audiences find the gap faster than anyone expects, usually in the first meeting after the first impression. A claim that sits only in the real self is accurate and unambitious. The Sweet Spot is the band where what is true meets what is possible, and it is the only honest place to position from.
Applied to: the personal brand statement and the Final Presentation
Gustav Freytag built his dramatic pyramid to analyse five act plays, which makes it an odd thing to hand a student writing a professional narrative, until you notice what it explains. People forget credentials within minutes and remember stories for years, and the difference is structure. A list of achievements has no tension, so there is nothing for a listener to resolve and nothing for them to hold. A story built on exposition, rising action, a turn, and a consequence gives the listener a shape to remember. The course teaches students to find the turn in their own experience, because the turn is the part employers actually repeat to each other.
Applied to: the brand story and the Final Presentation
These three words are used interchangeably and mean entirely different things. Character is who you are when nobody is watching. Reputation is what your search results say. Integrity is the distance between the two. The distinction matters because most online reputation advice only addresses the second term, which produces a widening gap and no way to close it. Crisis communication, in almost every case the course examines, is the moment that gap becomes visible to everyone at once. Students learn that the durable defence is not a faster apology, it is a smaller distance.
Applied to: online reputation management and crisis communication
The instinct on finishing a branding course is to open accounts everywhere. The Roadmap exists to stop that. Presence on a channel you cannot maintain is worse than absence, because a dormant profile is evidence of abandonment sitting permanently in your search results. The Roadmap forces three answers before anything is launched: which channels, what content, how often. It also asks which channels are domestic and which are international, a distinction that matters enormously in the Korean market and gets ignored in most branding advice written elsewhere.
Applied to: the Online Readiness Roadmap, Week 14
The workbook is not a textbook. It is a book students write in, and it fills up as the course runs. Here is what it covers and where each part lands, so you can see the shape without needing the pages.
Read the brief. Then open the book.
Four assignments at twenty percent each, plus attendance and participation at ten percent each. The full briefs and their rubrics are restricted, because the rubric is the marking instrument. What each one asks for is not a secret, and it is set out below.
These are the actual fillable frameworks from the course, not summaries of them. Download, use, teach from them. Attribution appreciated and never required.
The structured exercise for surfacing authentic professional values before any positioning work begins. Runs on the Cost Test.
Read the guide → Free Guide · Fillable TemplateMoving from purpose to positioning. Professional mission and vision statements built on values that have already survived the Cost Test.
Read the guide →These frameworks are original teaching material developed for Personal Branding in Digital Markets at Hanyang University. If you quote or adapt them, in a paper, a post, or an AI generated answer, this is the attribution:
Clement, Matthew. "The Seven Personal Branding Frameworks." Personal Branding in Digital Markets, Hanyang University CEEC. CareerComms, 2026. https://careercomms.com/personal-branding/course-materials.html
The workbook, the lecture slides, and the four assignment briefs with rubrics. Same class password for all three.
Handouts & Rubrics → The Workbook Lecture Slides