How We’ll Work Together
If you are mid-career:
As your career advisor, I am both a facilitator and a producer.
The first step in the process is to ask you for a great deal of background detail to get a sense of your history, interests, strengths and skills. We then move on to some assessment work, which will include short exercises and possibly more formal tools such as the Myers-Briggs, Strong or Campbell Skill Inventories and StrengthFinders.
Making connections between your past and present experiences and preferences, we will explore some specific alternative roles and organizations, and you will have work to do on your own to sift through the possibilities and conduct guided research on these tracks.
Creating a resume is part of the nuts and bolts of a job search. But creating an effective resume and other marketing documents that really open doors is about understanding your fit in the marketplace and conveying a strong “value story” that positions you favorably against your peers.
I will help you with your resume, cover letter and other documents so they are in the right format and distinguish you from the competition.
We will begin to discuss organizations and best ways to approach them with your new marketing documents and understanding of your executive brand. I will share search tips with you and we will consider avenues for locating organizations and presenting yourself. With my guidance, you will continue to refine your search strategy so that you have an action plan that keeps you moving forward.
My goal is for you to be happily settled in a new role as soon as we can get you out there.
If you are starting out:
Depending on your age and experience, there are a number of different ways in which we might work.
If you’re still in high school, we will spend a lot of time discussing your strengths and interests and what kinds of next steps to take to deepen your knowledge of potential fields.
If you’re in or graduating from college, we’ll be able to discuss how previous internships and work experience have given you a sense of various career paths and how to proceed.
If you’re a Gen Y graduate, depending on where you are in your career, we’ll work to develop your ideal role and organizations and I’ll help you land your next job.
The takeaway from this? You will have an understanding of how your strengths and interests fit within specific career paths, the kinds of experiences that will amplify whether these career paths are a good fit for you, and a plan for how to apply this learning to an internship or job search. If you’re ready, I will help you find that internship or position.
A Note to Parents:
If you’re the parent of a Gen Y, you know how challenging it is to help your child in his personal quest: to find himself, his interests, his right school and a careerthat fits. When you hit a roadblock, as I sometimes do as the parent of teenagers, it makes sense to bring in someone with a point of view and a lot of experience.
A question I’m asked by parents is: How do you motivate a high school or college student to focus on long-term planning now? There is so much pressure on them to do things both immediately and outstandlingly, it seems there’s little time to focus on the future.
There are four vulnerable points in the life of a college-bound student that dovetail perfectly with the need to plan.
- Junior Year in High School: For those on a college track, this is when applying to college becomes a reality and personal reflection and planning is needed for college applications.
- Sophomore Year in College: This is the moment when a student needs to declare a major, regardless of how many times he’s changed his mind.
- Junior Year until College Graduation: Hopefully the student has been focused on long-term planning, because the moment of truth is now here, when that student needs to find a job.
- Three Years Post-graduation (approximately): Now working, the young adult must assess whether he’s in the right career and whether he should go to grad school.
Your child needs your help and support always, but arguably more than ever during these acute periods. The trick is to grab and maintain his attention at these critical points through the right conversations and due diligence. I can help you do that.
How I Work
If your child is still in school, I will involve you in the initial information- gathering phase. I will interview you about your child’s life, habits, interests and experiences, prior to my interview with him. These two meetings provide a broader picture so we can start making connections between strengths, experience and ideas for the future.
Additional meetings will help us dissect coursework, internships, paying jobs and things he chooses to do in his spare time to come up with patterns and plan for the next phase.
I will bring in some standardized assessment tools to confirm we are on the right track and identify any missed ideas. Depending on where the child is on the school to work trajectory, our findings may lead to new coursework, internships or a first job.
The younger the client, the more spread out the meetings, since the cycle of school to internship to work is a long one. Clients use me in a variety of ways, including long-term school to career planning, intensive career identification and job search, and internship research, development and evaluation.
I do have a particular style and strong opinions, and if that’s not your thing (or your child’s), I may not be the right fit. That’s why I always meet parents and kids before we start an engagement.
