CERTIFICATION COMPETENCIES
Assist clients in considering the impact of career decisions and transitions on their relationships, daily experiences, culture, and personal wellness.
Frame “soft skill” development within broader paradigms of neuroscience, meaning-making, and relational-cultural perspectives.
Help clients reframe their approach to the gig world-of-work with healthy and accurate mindsets as they make career decisions.
Analyze issues of culture and justice with clients to develop critical thinking skills as they interact with the world-of-work.
Adapt your current practices to the 21st Century world-of-work. via Reframe techniques.
Kowabunga! This term was picked up by surfers in the 1950’s to express awe and gratitude in the face of the ocean’s power. The 21st Century world-of-work confronts most workers with a similar sense of magnitude, fear and power. Using the metaphor of surfing, this self-paced course digs deeply into current challenges and provides a 5-step framework for helping clients reframe their mindsets to better understand and adapt to new circumstances, from hyper-connectivity to global capitalism.
Our work is normally employer focused, asking clients to adapt to the expectations of corporate or public institutions upon which the current world-of-work has been constructed. We know from research that bias and prejudice are built into these systems. If career services professionals do not help all clients become more conscious of these systems while encouraging personal agency when making career decisions, the system will never change. They will never become more fair, more just. How do you own experiences of work form the spectrum of privilege and opportunity you have in your life, and how can you shift your career services practice to better incorporate ideas of justice for all workers?
Why are you working? Now, think about the last three clients that you saw and imagine how they would answer this same question. Are you able to imagine their responses? Encouraging career services professionals to diminish work and enhance the focus on life within their practice can seem counterintuitive. If we dig deeper, isn’t this the only approach that makes sense in a 21st Century world-of-work?
Gratitude, Humility, Empathy, Care, and Kindness are essential elements when fostering “soft skill” development. If these deeper phenomena are not considered, soft skill work in coaching and counseling becomes an exercise in pantomiming behaviors versus real client change. To use a gardening metaphor, it matters whether or not a seed is planted in a bed of fertilized soil, sand, or gravel. Similarly, it matters whether a client is practicing soft skills with you, a career services professional, at a shallow level or from a deeper more meaningful place.
Multiculturalism is a term that is used so ubiquitously that many may hesitate to define the term even though they have a deep sense of its meaning. This course will begin each lesson taking a sociological view of one aspect of culture as a companion to each component of the G.H.E.C.K. Model. I will provide curated on-line content (both videos and readings) to lay the knowledge basis for the topic before using a closing dialogue in which I will discuss and demonstrate approaches to the topic of each lesson.