Managing One’s Career: Creating and Capturing Opportunities
Careering is a process — a mode of striving to excel in one’s chosen profession. It is a life long process of reviewing, adjusting, and changing one’s goals, strategies, and expectations to realize achievement, success, recognition, and power. “Managing One’s Career” is a seminar designed to encourage individual responsibility for taking charge of one’s own career. Emphasis is focused on being proactive; being responsive to change; being committed to continuous learning; and assessing one’s skills, interest, and values on an ongoing basis.
Key topics:
- Introduction to Career Management
- Clarifying the Job Description and Work Expectations
- Building Credibility
- Establishing Realistic Work and Career Goals.
- Performance Management
- Identifying and Choosing a Mentor
- Formulating a Professional Development and Career Plan
- Moving Past Having a Job to Having a Career
Mentoring: A Strategy that is Enabling
It is generally agreed that sharing in a mentoring relationship can boost one’s career/professional/technical development. But, what is mentoring? How does one function in a mentorship alliance? What are the essential roles and responsibilities? Who benefits from mentoring and how? This seminar explores these and other questions regarding the mentoring process. Participants will take from the seminar practical advice and proven strategies they can use to function effectively in a mentoring alliance.
Key topics:
- Decoding the Language and Philosophy of Mentoring
- Establishing Needs and Expectations
- Roles and Responsibilities of Mentors/Protégés
- Identifying, Screening, and Selecting a Mentor
- Building a Mentorship Alliance
- Developing Mentorship Goals and Action Steps
- Utilizing Multiple Mentors
- Putting the Pieces Together
Networking: A Required Skill for Successful Careering
To succeed in today’s competitive world of work, who you know can be as critical as what you know. Successfully networking — developing contacts and building allies — is a required skill. Networking involves: 1) making contacts, 2) establishing cordial relationships, and 3) ultimately bonding to share information and to provide mutual support. This seminar is designed to present skills and techniques for gathering information and making contacts using networking strategies. During the session, the following questions will be addressed:
- What is networking?
- What are the keys to effective networking practices?
- How can one use networking to plan and manage one’s future?
Professionalism in the Workplace
First impressions do count whether it is appearance, communication skills, personal image, organizational skills, or professional behavior. One’s professionalism in the workplace can influence how others interact with you. This seminar is designed to expose participants to practices and principles of professionalism in the workplace.
Key topics:
- Essential Elements of Professionalism in the Workplace
- Performing a Personal Skills/Attributes Audit
- Overcoming barrier to communicating with others.
- Building supportive allies.
- Managing negative situations to yield positive outcomes.
- Developing and Maintaining Creditability
- Developing Priorities and Setting Acceptable Performance Goals
- Creating an Action Plan for Future Personal Growth
- Implementing a Career/Life Goal Plan
Leadership for Building Culturally Inclusive Teams
Creating an enabling and supportive work environment must be a part of an organization’s strategic plan. The changing dynamics of today’s workplace requires a different leadership paradigm if the work environment is to be supportive of culturally inclusive teams. This seminar examines leaderships from the prospective of a manager’s capacity to build, implement, and inspire culturally inclusive teams. Participants will explore 1) required competencies of successful team leaders; and 2) why it is imperative that leaders be able to harness the skills and commitment of every team member.
Key topics:
- Leadership With in the Team Concept
- What People Expect of Their Team Leader
- “How-to” Establish and Implement Culturally Inclusive Teams
- Facilitating Consensus Around Team Driven Goals
- Key Tips for Making Culturally Inclusive Teams Works
Managing the Summer Internship Experience
Managers of summer interns have responsibilities for making the experience developmental, educational, and rewarding. The objective of this seminar is to enhance the skills of managers (mentors) for managing the summer internship experience. It addresses: 1) relevant issues to planning for the arrival of summer interns; 2) structuring the work assignment; 3) managers’ roles and responsibilities; and 4) factors/issues to consider in establishing the work plan.
Key topics:
- Getting Ready for the Intern’s Arrival
- Formulating Specific, Measurable, and Achievable Work Goals
- Defining and Meeting Intern’s Needs and Expectations
- Managing the Experience; Linking Theory to Practice
- Closing the Loop: Development, Performance, and Assessment
- Turning Summer Interns into Organizational “Ambassadors/Future Employees
Motivation and Leadership: Careering Imperatives
As organizations become more and more flat, the demand for effective leadership will grow at all levels. This seminar offers a practical, straightforward look at the relationship between motivation and leadership. Participants examine attributes that stimulate and develop leaders. The facilitator draws from lifetime experiences, extensive readings, and personal stories to address five core competencies: leadership attributes, understanding change and resistance to change, cultivating relationships, visioning and goal setting, and leading the team to achieve action steps.
Key topics:
- Terminology of Leadership
- Trends that Challenge Leaders
- Competencies of an All-Star leader
- Identifying Leadership Styles
- Strategic Planning and Leadership
- Creating the Optimal Leadership Environment
Creating Your Future: Setting Goals to Define Career and Life Purpose
Advancing through one’s career and life depends on the ability to turn dreams, desires, and wishes into tangible goals, objectives, and milestones. Each individual has the power and responsibility to be both a dreamer and a doer. Success depends on both.
This seminar is designed to guide participants through a process that frames dreams, wishes, and desires in the context of career and life GOALS. Participants will explore critical career and life planning strategies.
Key topics:
- Clarifying your career and life purpose.
- Take responsibility to plan for the future.
- Defining and writing clear career and life goal statements.
- Success conditioning.
- The value of identifying and maintaining success anchors.
Mentoring: An Effective Strategy for Transitioning New Hires Into the Workplace.
Corporations should view the initial 6 to12 months in the work life of a new hire as a transition period. This period can be a very stressful time for new hires. They are often overwhelmed by apprehension, anxiety and isolation, as they learn to deal with a plethora of concerns, i.e.: 1)
conforming to the organization’s values and culture; 2) establishing realistic work and career goals; 3) understanding how advancements occur and what is rewarded; 4) learning communi-cation channels; 5) creating visibility and getting notice. One strategy that is proving useful both in the orientation and the transition phase is formalized mentoring.
This session is designed to examine transition mentoring and how it can be used to enhance new hire development/retention.
Key topics:
- Critical elements of effective transition mentoring programs.
- Best” practice strategies for mentors and Protégés.
- Establishing responsibilities for mentorship alliance mentors/Protégés.
- Minimizing potential problems surrounding issues of gender, ethnicity, communication,
expectations, etc.
Recruiting Diverse Employees: Proven Strategies and Techniques
The purpose of an effective diversity recruitment program is to identify, obtain an application, and screen for hire a quality applicant. Whether the program is centralized in the staffing unit or decentralized by functional departments, the goal remains the same; getting a quality new hire to fill a specific job.
Unfortunately, some organizations do-not have a systematic program for recruiting diverse employees. This seminar is designed to provide participants with practical knowledge and skills germane to effective diversity recruitment. The session explores strategies for dealing with the many myths, misconceptions, denials, and fears that sometimes accompany efforts to develop and implement a diversity recruitment plan.
Key topics:
- Dispelling the myths surrounding diversity recruiting.
- Develop a diversity recruitment plan.
- Identifying and analyzing the potential applicant pool.
- Marketing for diversity recruitment,
- Relationship building with feeder sources.
- Reviewing and screening applications.
- Making the employment offer.
- Follow-up.