Supporting a friend's career development through Career Center resources

¶ … Career Center

The resources available in the Career Center are numerous. There are links in the Job Center, for example, to various hiring pages that can be used to help students apply to the different available jobs in the market. These links are categorized under the departments by which students identify their field -- from Agriculture, Animals and Livestock to Transportation. This is a valuable source for identifying opportunities in the real world.

Career videos are another helpful resource that give helpful tips on how to market oneself and make the most of the gifts and talents that students have as individuals. For instance, Bennie Covington gives a talk on how to build a brand -- and a brand can be something you produce or it can be your own self (based on your own achievements and the way you present yourself -- like LeBron James does, or even Donald Trump -- both have branded themselves to the public). Other videos discuss important topics like organizational culture, networking and how to interview. So there are many helpful tips here.

Other resources include guides on how to find a job, get a job, and keep a job. There are guides for military transitioning back to civilian life, coaching tips and coaching profiles. In short, there are a lot of options in the Career Center to help a student get on his way.

The Person I am Supporting

The person I am supporting is my friend Carl S., who has already had some development and success in his advancement through his life, education and career -- but he still wants to grow and develop even more after all this time and for this reason I want to help him reach the next level that he desires to obtain. He is in management and has bounced around between jobs attempting to find his niche and the place where he feels happiest, most comfortable, and most productive. He is a creative person with a lot of energy and a strong desire to lead -- so in jobs where there are other natural leaders there is a tendency for Carl to come into conflict. Thus he has at times attempted to work as an independent contractor, which is an experience he has also learned from. He has a lot of knowledge about himself that he likes to share and reflect upon and he is always searching for ways to grow as a person, as a leader, and as a worker, and so we felt that it would be a good idea to see if I could apply what I have learned from this course to Carl and note its effect.

Using the Portals

Carl completed the Value of Education portal and the Handling Stress portal as well as the Value Rating Worksheet and the Skill Set Worksheet. Both of these worksheets plus the two portals regarding education and handling stress were very helpful for Carl. Though he has been in his career for many years, he immediately recognized that these were both extremely helpful tools. The reason he saw this was that he recognizes how important it is to stop and reflect on oneself and where one wants to be, where one is, and how to cover the distance. Thus, he was very happy to engage in the Value of Education portal and Stress portal as he saw how these tools could apply in his own life.

His projected career path is for him to eventually be his own boss again, leading his own team as they design instruments for companies around the world. Carl is very innovative and wants to be involved in the global market and use his gifts to make an impact on the entire planet. It is an ambitious goal so it requires an ambitious development plan.

This plan consists mainly in building on values that Carl has for himself and the talents and strengths that he possesses. It also consists of recognizing his weaknesses and overcoming them through continual education and challenging himself to view obstacles as opportunities. This is something he has done before in the past, especially when working for bosses that he did not agree with or particularly get along with. It was a challenge for him to adapt to this environment and handle the stress in a way that would be positive rather than negative.

As the Stress portal showed Carl, it is important to reduce stress and to recognize it in one's life. Carl had some difficulty doing this in the past and he would become frustrated when he could not figure out what was wrong. It was because he was not identifying the sources of stress. After he did, he began to develop a plan for himself that would help him to manage the stress. This plan actually took him away from the stress and could be seen as a failure to adapt to his environment in this point of his career. Instead of staying at his job, he decided to go elsewhere and start off on his own. He realized however that he had not learned to manage stress -- instead he had simply fled it only to found that the same issues were still impacting him. So the Stress portal helped him to see that this was the case and he confirmed for me that he now understood his own situation a little more clearly -- that instead of committing to a situation and learning to relax, he broke his commitment and tried another way.

However, at the same time, he felt that he was also being committed to himself and his own core values. After taking the Value Assessment Worksheet, he saw that what he valued was being around interesting people (which was one reason he decided to leave his one job and go for another -- it was not totally because of stress). He valued freedom from pressure/stress, independence, involvement in decision-making, mental challenge, power and influence, quality of product, recognition, and variety and change in work. All of these values, he assessed, helped him to better understand his own move. He also saw that these could help in developing a better plan for himself to meet the goals of his predicted career trajectory.

As for the Skill Set Worksheet, Carl had a lot of skills that he felt he was advanced or expert at -- from accepting responsibility to administering to analyzing, creating, deciding, designing, inventing, leading, organizing, and verbal communication. Some that he felt he needed work on were writing, adapting, comforting, balancing, asking questions, listening, and renewing. He felt that these skills, once developed, would help him on his way towards being head of his own company.

After utilizing these tools, Carl reflected on his own experiences and discussed what it means to him to be a leader and how his life so far has shaped his outlook. As he noted, being a leader is something that does not come overnight but requires foresight, "vision," and the ability to harness inspiration. As Kotter (2009) states, "leadership defines what the future looks like," and for this reason it is essential that leaders possess the necessary skills and values that are need to make the future possible for one's chose path. For Carl, leadership means to draw "meaning in negative and positive events" (Bennis, Thomas, 2002) and to help one grow even more as a result of applying oneself to both types of environments. With this ability to accept the good with the bad, so to speak, one can help to "influence" those around him -- and this is what Carl is attempting to work on at this point in his career. Leadersihp, for him, is based on a strategy of helping others to achieve their goals so that he might more effectively achieve his own (Robbins, Judge, 2013).

In Carl's experience self-awareness and emotional intelligence (EI) are great tools for growth. He pointed out that the Leadership Steps Assessment (Clawson, et al., 2000) is one way to help identify strengths and weaknesses for a better sense of what one might need to work on in order to grow as one desires. Carl also recognized that on top of these tools, relationships that he has made as well as people he admires are helpful in developing as a leader. Thus, he pointed out a few names that were inspirations to him over the years and why he looked to them as examples of leadership. These people were Bill Clinton, who rose out of Arkansas to be President, Nelson Mandela who overcame obstacles in Africa to lead his people, and Barack Obama who challenged the establishment he inherited in an attempt to make the world a better place. (These were Carl's views).

Carl observed that in his own life he had encountered individual leaders who had impacted him on a direct level. Growing up, his father was a great role model and taught him to stand up for himself and to see the importance of guiding others and providing support. He was a very positive influence on Carl's life and helped instill in him the values of perseverance, determination, and a thirst for success. From him Carl learned most of all how to make an executive decision.

Carl's wife has also been a good example of a leader for him as well: she shares his faith and appreciates his strengths and accepts his shortcomings. She has helped Carl to balance work and raising children. From her he has learned humility, how to truly be supportive, and how to see the good potential in others.

At the start of Carl's professional career way back in 1995, his boss taught him to take an interest in other people and to always strive to learn something no matter what the situation. He demonstrated superior strength of character, guidance and an impeccable private life.

In 2004, Carl took a job abroad and had a bad boss who he did not like. The boss was egocentric and had a bullying style of leadership. It was not a productive or creative time and Carl felt stressed by it. The job was not satisfying, there was no passion, and it was difficult for Carl to grow and develop as he wanted to and thought he could when he took the job. However, he drew a lesson from this time as well, and that was to renew his commitment to himself.

He earned another business degree in 2010 and had a great professor who helped him put his learning into practice. That same year he had another good boss experience in a global leadership role. He exposed Carl to strategic agendas and allowed him to develop his own ideas. It was a great confidence booster for Carl.

Throughout this time, Carl read Bill Clinton's "My Life" and learned the value of advocacy, communication and teamwork. He also read Nelson Mandela's "Long Walk to Freedom" and from him he gained a greater appreciation for endurance. From Barack Obama's book "Audacity of Hope," he learned the value of charisma, resilience, and consultation. He demonstrated a will to never give up and to embrace humility.

Today Carl uses all of his experiences to help him move forward as a leader by "learning from my life story" as George, Sims, McLean and Mayer (2007, p. 2) say to do. This means Carl looks at his own life and learns from each instance just as I would if were reading it as a 3rd party. More to the point, as Boaz and Fox (2014) state, the most important lesson that one can learn in becoming a good leader is to focus on changing oneself for the better rather than on attempting to change everyone else. The more effectively one can learn patience, perseverance, and other virtues, the more likely one is to be able to cope in every situation (and, yes, that means Carl has work to do in learning to cope with egocentric people). Changing oneself is in fact the first and best step in changing others.

For examples of best practices of leadership, Carl looks to his father, his wife, and all the other people he admires. He notes that his father has given him a lot in terms of how to be an effective and strong person, and that his wife has showed him how to be secure, caring, and compassionate person. Thus, the strengths that Carl has may be identified as Emotional Intelligence (EI), Social Intelligence (SI), communication skills, decisiveness, and curiosity (he always wants to know how things can be better or be improved and is never satisfied with accepting a status quo). The leaders Carl admires (such as Clinton and Obama) have taught him the value of being well-spoken, thoughtful, direct, and of having a sense of community. This value-sense correlates with what Kempster, Jackson, and Conroy (2011, p. 31) have emphasized, which is the relationship between purpose and leadership and how this relationship is something that must be made front and center in one's journey to becoming a leader in an organization. As Carl points out, had his teachers and employers not understood the effect of purpose in leadership, he would not have received any valuable guidance but would rather have been like a piece of flotsam.