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Professional Development for Career Practitioners

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Graduate to a Great Job. Make your College Degree Pay Off in TODAY’s Market. By David DeLong

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Graduate to a Great Job. Make your College Degree Pay Off in TODAY’s Market. By David DeLong

One of my jobs is working part time at Colby College in the Career Center and the Director loaned me this book because David is a Colby alumni and she had recently met him.  Curious, I began reading it when I was covering “drop-in” hours and was hooked immediately.  I finished it over the weekend, great stuff!

This is a book written to college students and their parents and is filled with practical advice on a range of job seeking topics from networking (which is obviously the key piece), the importance of internships, tips on writing a strong resume, interviewing, attitude, and the parents role (one chapter devoted to what parents should and should not do). He also recommends getting into the College Career Center and getting as much as you can out of it while the student is there.

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The Encore Career Handbook. By Marci Alboher

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The Encore Career Handbook.  How To Make A Living And A Difference In The Second Half Of Life. Marci Alboher

I stumbled onto this book one day at Barnes & Nobles when I was trying to burn up my Christmas gift certificate and it was a wonderful discovery.  Not only am I a “boomer” but I provide career counseling / coaching for Boomers and found this book to be “chock-a-block” full of information, resources, activities, and great ideas for anyone who is over 50 and thinking about leaving their full time job for something new.

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Marci starts with reinventing yourself, explores options, take some self assessments, consider financial issues, network to create more options, “do things” to create your own luck, and even explores being your own boss and creating a business.

The handbook ends with an encore hot list of jobs, sample resumes & bios, a budget worksheet, a business plan builder, and further reading.

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The Third Chapter by Sara Lawrence -Lightfoot

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The Third Chapter by Sara Lawrence -Lightfoot is a great book on understanding this Third Chapter of life and how we as career practitioners can help people successfully navigate aging.  She states this navigation requires curiosity, adaptability, engagement in new perspectives, skills, experiences, and vulnerability & uncertainty.  Yes, it complicated but millions of Boomers are facing this time in their life that will require assistance.

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She speaks to the developmental stage perspective using Bridges Transition work, Eriksons’ view of life span, and gerontologists Neugarten & Hagestad who say “people no longer move from adulthood to old age, but instead go through a relatively long interval when physical vigor remains high, family responsibilities are low, and commitment to work continues but changes.”

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How To Get Any Job With Any Major

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How To Get Any Job With Any Major (or how to avoid living in your parent’s basement) by Don Asher

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As I write this, we looking to bring Don Asher to Colby College this spring and I wanted to read this book in preparation for his visit.  I have seen Don present at the Middle Atlantic Career Counseling Association and was very impressed.

This book was no disappointment.   Like Don, this is a very practical honest view of what college age people should be doing (and not doing) if they want to find work.  He says, “the purpose of college is to find what makes you happy.” and that colleges “should also give you the skills to do that.”  There are still lots of people that look to colleges for specific work skills and the reality is that colleges help expand thinking, culture, and discovery by introducing people to a variety of subject areas and activities on campus.

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Creativity, Card Sorts & The Conversation

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Creativity is one of the reasons I enjoy using a variety of “card-sorts” in career coaching with Boomers & with Colby College students.  There are no answers printed out from a software program,  no one way of using the cards, only the conversation it generates.  I LOVE it!

If you have not used card sorts in your practice, I suggest you explore using them.  If you use them now, keep up the good work!

I recently met with a first year college student who was all confused about choosing an occupation.  She was so “hung up” on choosing a specific job that she practically stumbled all over herself, “I thought about being a lawyer because my mom is one, then going into medicine, then being an architect…I even went to a month long architect camp, and I’ve thought about sociology.”  I have a magnetic dart board in my office with various occupations on it and I asked, “Do you want to choose a career by throwing the dart?”  She actually said yes and was literally ready to choose by throwing a dart!  She hit Land Use Planning and immediately wanted to know about that job.  

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Why we all need to “fail forward”.

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Failing forward is an entrepreneurial philosophy embracing and learning from failure.  Thomas Edison, Wayne Gretzky, Albert Einstein, and Jim Peacock have all had many great failures.  The key is to “fail forward”…. learn from your mistakes and don’t be afraid to try something new again.

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In a recent Inc. magazine, they wrote about a “Failure Church” where one company encouraged its employees to proclaim their failures out loud. Some failures were small, some big, and after the person announced their failure all the attendees applaud wildly! Pretty bizarre but they all said it feels good to get the failure off their chest and feels even BETTER when their fellow employees applaud.

It actually encourages employees to try new things.  Failure Church is a support group with failures that, too often,  we brush under the carpet like the gambler who only tells people when they win.  Other cultures encourage students and people to work hard and to keep trying even when you don’t understand something.  This process is filled with failures. But with hard work, perseverance, and some risk taking, failures often lead to successes.  It is really what you LEARN from the experience that counts.

“The key is to fail forward…. learn from your mistakes and don’t be afraid to try something new again” 

This fear of failure can pervade our work life by not trying something new and our personal life by living a stodgy boring life because you don’t try anything new.  Happenstance Learning Theory tells us we can discover opportunities by taking action and “creating luck” which I like to call “intentional serendipity”.  A person taking my Facilitating Career Development (FCD) class recently posted how her friends dad was told he’d never work in the animation field and was let go by Disney to open a small startup called Pixar.  He encouraged his daughter and her friends to always “fail forward”, take risks, learn from them, and keep going forward.

Take action and use “intentional serendipity”, take some risks, and be open to what you discover. College students declare majors and then discover they “don’t want to do that”, which can be perceived by family and friends as a “failure”.  We need to encourage students to embrace change and to try new things such as info interviews, involvement in activities, volunteer, internships, etc.. and fail forward.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.... you need to “go for it” when you want to improve your business, better yourself, or help your clients/students learn.  Embrace failure, but “fail forward” learn from it, improve on it, and keep taking action. Wake up and love what you do taking chances and enjoying the serendipity that life brings us.

What risks will you take?
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If you like this topic of discovering opportunities through failure and embracing intentional serendipity, you might want to check out this 5 week, discussion-based, online seminar for career practitioners.
Career Advising Using Happenstance.

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Jim Peacock is the Principal at Peak-Careers Consulting and writes a weekly email for career practitioners. Peak-Careers offers discussion-based online seminars for career practitioners focused on meeting continuing education needs for CCSP, GCDF and BCC certified professionals as well as workshops for career practitioners and individual career coaching.

He is the author of A Field Guide for Career Practitioners: Helping Your Clients Create Their Next Move and The Adventure of Finding Me in New Zealand. In 2020 he received the Kenneth C. Hoyt Award from the National Career Development Association and the Mid-Atlantic Career Counseling Association’s Professional Contribution’s Award.

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