PhD Academic Residency Program Transcript

Transcription

1 PhD Academic Residency Program Transcript Career Management Lisa Cook: My name is Lisa Cook. I'm from the career services center at Walden University, and this is the career management presentation. Before we get started, let's start with a pre-assessment. Which group will be yours? Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, or those who wonder what happened? In pursuing your degree with Walden, you're enhancing your skills, knowledge, and abilities. And you're proactively managing your career throughout your academic endeavors. So you are definitely in the group that's making it happen. How can the career services center assist you in proactively managing your career? We offer a number of resourced on the career services center website to assist you in these efforts. First of all, a career transition or a job change often starts when you start to assess your interests, value skills, and personality. Assessments on this part of our website include the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is a personality assessment, the strong interest inventory, which assesses interests in comparison with those in various career fields, as well as informal assessments of your skills and values. Additionally, the site enables you to research career information and job opportunities and build your network. The site includes career information and job opportunities listed by specific school or college, so you might want to bookmark that for your specific career field. In addition, it offers professional association sites as well as job sites such as indeed.com, monster.com, CareerBuilder, and others. In doing this type of research, you will better be able to decide the types of opportunities and employers that you want to target. And then the career services center can help you tailor your qualifications and your marketing efforts to employers' needs. We encourage students and alumni to develop a personalized work focus. Rather than just a job title, a personalized work focus indicates how you are marketable to a wide variety of employers. So for example, for myself, I would say I'm a higher education administrator in career development rather than my specific job title, because I want to consider myself able to meet a variety of employers' needs. And then finally, our resources

2 and our other individual advising services can help you land your position and actively manage your career. In addition to the career services center website, we offer one-on-one advising to assist you, as well as a blog featuring students' success stories, a Walden University LinkedIn group to help you build your professional network, and webinars on a wide variety of career-related topics. In proactively managing your career, you want to begin now at Walden. There's a quote by Herminia Ibarra from her book Working Identity. "Humans are more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of acting." So this means you should fake it 'til you make it and walk the talk of your future career goal now while you're at Walden University through your academic program. There are several strategies that will help you do this. First of all, it's wise to identify action steps and qualifications of the specific role you're moving towards in order to be marketable for future employers and opportunities. You can do so through setting smart goals early and starting to close any qualification gaps during your program of study. A smart goal is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-specific. So for example, if your smart career goal is to get a position teaching in higher education after you graduate, what are specific steps that you can start to take now to gain experience in teaching in higher education? Well, to put on the hat of an academic, it might be really good to publish your dissertation or present at an academic conference, follow academic discussion boards online, track positions, and read The Chronicle of Higher Education to stay up on trends in academia. And in doing activities such as these, you will also build your internal and external professional networks. I've been discussing the importance of networking and proactively managing your career, and I want to be more specific about why networking and branding are so important in the context of today's workplace. There is a shift away from clear career ladders of upward mobility in today's employment market. Organizational structures are flatter and there are fewer top management positions. So you want to think about progressing in your career through expanding your connections and gaining more experience and skills in your area. Think in terms of what skills can you carry from one professional role to another. Rather than just thinking about a career ladder, consider how to widen your circle of influence, both within your own organization and beyond through networking and building your brand. There are ways to do this. What online presence are you maintaining through LinkedIn and other social networking avenues? Are you keeping a blog? Are you contributing articles to your professional association? Are you involved in a board or in a leadership role in your professional field?

3 There are numerous ways to exert your influence beyond your immediate organization into the wider world of work. Time and time again, networking is pinpointed as the top way to advance your career. Networking is defined as the art of building and sustaining mutuallybeneficial relationships. So be sincere and give back. There are numerous benefits of networking. First of all, Richard Bolles is quoted as saying 80% percent of jobs are in the hidden job market, meaning that they are filled before they're even advertised through an employee referral or internally within an organization. So through networking, you want to find out about those opportunities before they're advertised. Next, you can gain access to information outside of a job description by talking to your networking contacts. You can also impress an employer in a non-interview context. And you also have an opportunity to further establish your brand or your reputation through networking. Two very famous individuals who were actively engaged in networking are Ben Franklin and Bill Clinton. Ben Franklin started a mutual improvement society that met on Friday evenings, and that group was very responsible for starting the University of Pennsylvania. Bill Clinton maintained three by five index cards for each individual that he met with detailed information about that person so that the next time he ran into them, he would be able to pick up where they left off in conversation. So that was a very important key to his success. In a recent webinar delivered by the career services center on networking, 70% of the 150 students that we polled stated that they got their last job through networking. So you definitely want to make this a key part of your proactive career management. A key strategy in networking is informational interviewing. Informational interviewing means exactly as it sounds. It means an exchange of information during an informal meeting. There are three types of informational interviews. First of all, during the general informational interview, you can learn about various career fields. In an advice and suggestion informational interview, you would meet with people in the job that you want to obtain, learn how to land that kind of job, the pros and cons, the likes and dislikes that that person might have regarding that job. The third type of informational interview is a job prospecting informational interview. In that type, you meet with the person in a position to actually hire you to inform them of your qualifications and interests so that they consider you when an opening occurs. A key strategy in proactive career management is branding. Your personal brand consists of what is unique about you: your accomplishments, your experiences, and your attitudes that differentiate you from others. It is your competitive edge. It only takes 3 to 20 seconds to make a first impression through your brand, so you want to give it as positive an impact as possible.

4 There are numerous ways to strengthen your brand. You want to play to your strengths in doing your brand. What are you passionate about? What are you the go-to person for? For example, if you're known for having top computer skills in your organization, that is a key part of your brand that you want to market to others and to potential employers. Second, connect with and communicate with people via the most effective way for you and for them. So for example, if you're into online social networking, build a really strong LinkedIn profile that highlights your most relevant and strongest work experiences. Or if you're into offline networking, join professional networking groups through meetup.com. In conducting your networking efforts, consider how you can help your audience meet their needs. Identify how you can add value. For example, if you're going to meet with an individual for an informational interview, and you've just read an article that they might find interesting, take a copy of that article to the informational interview and provide a copy to them. Finally, recognize the gaps in your personal brand and work on closing them. For example, if your goal is to go into teaching in higher education, and you lack a great deal of experience in this area, perhaps you could teach a course in the community education program in your area to develop your skills in teaching. A key part of branding is tracking your accomplishments. We have a three-part acronym for accomplishments. We call it the CAR. In driving your car forward, you advance your career. CAR stands for challenge, action, result. So for example, what is a challenge that you've addressed, either personally or professionally throughout your career? What action did you take in addressing the challenge? Did you initiate that action? And third, what are the results of your actions? Who or what was impacted and how? So for example, if you are engaged in community service work, how many people were served by your efforts? Did you raise money through a fundraiser or save money through making things more efficient? Did you improve a process or help your organization meet a key goal? In tracking your accomplishments, you'll find that they are very useful in several different contexts. First of all, you can use your accomplishments to develop strong marketing materials, namely your resume and your curriculum vitae, because employers are most interested in what accomplishments you've done in the past, because past performance is a really key indicator of future performance. Also, in writing a performance review, a supervisor might ask you if you could submit a list of your key accomplishments for the past year in case they've missed any of those accomplishments. And so through tracking that, you'll have a written record to hand right over to your supervisor.

5 And third, also keeping your accomplishments is a good part of building your brand, because it keeps the key things that you're working on and what you produced in your mind so that if you meet an individual, say, at a professional conference, and they ask about the type of work you do, you'll highlight not only the type of work that you do, but how you've contributed to your organization. There's a saying, luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Hopefully, the strategies covered in this presentation will help you prepare to take action steps towards meeting your career goals. Additionally, I hope that you'll consult the advisers and the resources of the career services center to uncover additional opportunities to enhance your career development, because you are definitely making it happen. Laureate Education, Inc. 2011