Do you look ready to reach out? Feel ready? Sound ready? This interactive session discusses career path development and job-hunting strategies for extroverts and introverts. Practice your 30-second pitch, watch or do mock interviews, analyze your speaking voice and style, find out if your wardrobe is working for you, and hear things prospective employers won’t or can’t ever tell you. Learn to articulate your value proposition, document your skills and successes, create and maintain your network, leverage alumni and community resources, present yourself professionally, coach your references, and conquer your fear of negotiation. Topics include self-presentation, communicating clearly and with confidence, and new approaches to and uses for your resume, business card, company bio, LinkedIn profile and references. Sessions are also available for students seeking internships and full-time jobs after graduation.

How you communicate is a key part of your professional image and reputation. Focus on your writing, public speaking, and interpersonal skills with the goal of becoming a more effective communicator. Begin by assessing your oral, written, and nonverbal communication styles, and then learn strategies to tailor verbal and nonverbal messages for supervisors, clients, and coworkers across ages and cultures. Modules focus on business writing, including emails, memos, and reports; presentation skills and public speaking; and interpersonal communication, including body language and nonverbal communication.

How do you figure out what you want to do, whether you are currently employed or not? What’s the right time to seek a promotion and/or role change within your organization? How do you prepare to reposition or re-invent yourself?  How do you break into a new area? Topics include developing the right mindset and confidence, quantifying your value, and learning to talk about transferable skills in the language of your target group/area.

Why negotiate? What’s negotiable? Why are women less likely to negotiate than men? Topics include fear not of failure, but success; how to research what to ask for; timelines, strategies and language for negotiating a new salary and title.

How do you build and demonstrate expertise? How should you develop and document your skills and successes? How can you use an existing evaluation system to your advantage? Topics include human resources and managers as allies and advocates, making the most of often overlooked resources, and connecting with colleagues of all ages and backgrounds.

If the idea of “personal branding” and “networking” makes you cringe, what should you be doing instead? How do you discover networks you didn’t even know you had?  How do you reach out authentically in person or virtually, follow up, and maintain the connection? Topics include crafting, practicing and refining your 30-second pitch; how to prepare for a networking event or opportunity; acculturation and small talk. 

Are you where you want to be in your career or volunteer organization? Women often report anxiety, guilt and fear of negative consequences in pursuing a promotion, whereas men are much more likely to initiate salary negotiations, to ask for what they want, and to get what they believe they’re worth. It’s time to close the confidence gap.  To move ahead, women need to determine and articulate career goals, and to connect with colleagues who can help achieve them. With new ways to reach out, access to readily available resources, and an “Extreme Professional Makeover,” women can become powerful advocates for themselves. 

Re-Entering the Work World

A confidence-building refresher course on the topics above for those who have been laid off, fired, long-term unemployed, out of work for physical or emotional illness or other family crisis, forced back into the workforce by a change of marital or economic circumstance, fear age discrimination, or who have been home with children or caring for family members.