College to Career Program

“You did more in 1 hour than my college career center did in 4 years.”  Tim A., Storrs, Connecticut

Meeting 1: Vision Creation

This is the high impact, big picture, vision-creating meeting that has changed the lives of many of Career Counseling Connecticut’s clients. We directly address the life-changing question: what do you want to do when you grow up?

We customize based upon each unique client. But our standard processes include:

Pre-meeting:

• Completion of personality profiling tests
• Creation of career narrative
• Review of resume/background/skills/natural strengths

All material is reviewed before the first meeting so that we are “ready to go” immediately.

Interactive meeting:

• Develop a deep understanding of our client’s credentials, skills, natural strengths, values, personality preferences, and life situation
• Based on our expert understanding of the career marketplace and our client, suggest the optimal career path to explore
• Provide the initial steps to verify and move forward on the path

The stunning result from our happiest of clients has been gaining career clarity after a single meeting.  For others, we have shifted the current career path to an adjacent but far better area and/or steered them away from paths that likely would lead to unhappiness.

But…we caution: some clients have expressed to their friends they had “no clue” regarding their career path prior to meeting with us and left with a career path that they had never previously considered.

While this has happened occasionally, the vast majority of our clients are confused about which path to take but have usually considered the various options that we discuss.

The value stems from getting clients “unstuck” between options through objectively analyzing each and guiding our clients towards the optimal path.

We appreciate that some of our clients have called our meetings “life changing” but we would prefer to give them more credit and simply suggest that we pull out the client’s own inner wisdom so that our meetings are “career clarifying.”

Commentary for Those Interested in Our Method: “The How”

The “how” falls squarely within the same paradigm of all experts who counsel others.   Some of you may have worked with college counselors.

The best ones combine a deep understanding of their clients with a similarly deep understanding of college possibilities.  Their judgment is valued because they can efficiently and effectively create a college exploration list and can wisely provide advice regarding significant decisions, and what needs to be done to ensure a happy outcome. This is true with advisors in different areas of significance where experts demonstrate top notch judgment based on their experience with past similar patterns, profound knowledge of their area of expertise, and advisory skills to counsel each unique client.

Similarly, career counselors – the good ones – , deeply understand their clients, the career marketplace, the best matches between the two, and how to most effectively move their clients onto their optimal career path.

Meeting Two: Strategy

• Train our clients in the best methods to move forward aggressively onto their career path of interest

• Provide a work plan for the next steps

• Provide timelines and accountability

Commentary:

If the career pilot has been verified, we spend our second meeting focused on the “how to get there” plan.

For many, this will mean training our clients on how to job search in the current job search landscape, which we should note is different than it was even 10 years ago and almost entirely different than it was 30 years ago.

For others, we have to initially ensure that they have the credentials or skills necessary to be a viable candidate for that career path. Sometimes this requires more school/training or repositioning of our clients’ background in order to match job descriptions.

We should also note the obvious: our success stems, in part, from not being the parent. We are well aware that many of our parent-clients are competent professionals in their own fields and likely could craft a reasonably effective, deadline based, job search plan for their child.  But we are equally aware of the relationship. challenges faced between parents and their adult-children.

Well-meaning advice from parents is often interpreted as criticism.  Moreover, we all have the tendency to defer to the “expert” -lucky us- so this enables us to effectively help our clients move forward.

Meeting Three: Tactics

• Train our clients in areas required to move forward (resumes, cover letters, networking, interviews)
• Identify and train to overcome practical and psychological blocks from moving forward

If we have the career vision and the career building strategy in place, we then move onto tactics. The most common tactics include: creation and customization of resumes, cover letters, and email inquiries and interview role plays.

We also ensure that they understand how to network both online and in person.  For others, we help identify graduate schools or training programs of interest and then help complete these applications. Thereafter, we hope our clients are ready to fly on their own.

We love our reputation as both high-impact and cost-effective.   But…. we know… many twentysomethings need continual interaction.  Accountability, moral support, continued coaching are sometimes required.  We are at your service “as needed” and for as long as needed for a lower hourly rate.

We look forward to helping.