NMI5050-001-13333 - CAREER WORK GROUP LEADER TRAINING - 0.2 credits

Course Description and Learning Goals

This class teaches coaching skills to Johnson Career Work Group Leaders (“CWG Leaders”) as they work with first year students to navigate the career search process. It provides CWG Leaders with tools necessary to help others make positive choices, gain clarity in regards to their needs and wants, and navigate ambiguity in regards to their career choices.

The class requires students to learn new skills and then practice them in group sessions both as a leader and as an observer.

Through this course, you should:

• Gain an understanding of your roles and responsibilities as a career coach, and how they differ from that of a friend, parent, teacher, etc.
• Learn fundamentals of coaching that will allow you to help the first year students make informed choices and accomplish their goals. Specifically we will discuss:
  • Creating connections: active listening, acknowledging and validating, maintaining appropriate eye contact and body language
  • Identifying the issue: learn to differentiate between the student’s articulated goal and more subtle cues
  • Roadblocks: identify fears, assumptions, interpretations, and limitations that the students is imposing on him/herself that may be preventing the student from achieving their goals or following their true path
  • Maintaining non-judgment: understand as a career work group leader how you can help the student achieve success without attributing your own values and judgments to them
  • “Staying out of the box”: coaching without getting emotionally invested to a particular outcome
  • Challenges of a peer facilitator: what experiences have you had in the past that may make this difficult? Understand how your own career success or perceived failures will impact your role when advising others.

Course Structure

The course includes a mandatory 4 hour training session, including mandatory participation in group exercises, and out-of-class responsibilities associated with coaching and mentoring first-year students interested in your career areas, including weekly career work group meetings throughout the fall semester.

Career Work Group Leader Responsibilities

As Career Work Group Leaders, you are critical to the career success of first year students. You not only provide students with tactical suggestions on how to accomplish their goals, but also provide them with mentorship almost immediately upon arrival to Johnson.  Career Work Group sessions are one of the first places where first year students get to interact with second year students and your professionalism and sensitivity is of the utmost importance.  Furthermore, as CWG Leaders you will work closely with the Career Management Center on the CWG curriculum and help the CMC identify any students that may need extra assistance.

Grading

In order to receive credit for being a CWG Leader, you must attend the training and participate actively throughout the fall session, which includes holding at least 7 career work group meetings with first year students. In addition, CWG leaders must complete a 2-page assignment in which you discuss the most relevant learning outcomes from serving as a CWG Leader.