Career/Life Planning
Series Entitled: "Career Advantage"

This career and life-planning telecourse helps students gain the self knowledge they need to enter the job force and maintain successful and rewarding careers. The course is broken into three major parts, consistent with National Occupational Information Coordination Committee (NOICC) guidelines for adult competencies and indicators: self-knowledge, educational and occupational exploration and career planning.
Throughout the course five "real" people are followed as they go through the process of discovering and realizing their career goals. From a young mother struggling through college to a re-entry students creating a new life, their stories are poignant and energizing. Each episode also includes a "Hot Tip" - a short, simple motivation suggestion of action students can take to help students overcome the inertia that often accompanies the new territory of career and life-planning.
The course includes interviews with authors Barbara Sher and Richard Bolles, author of the best-selling book "What Color Is Your Parachute?: A Practical Manual for Job Hunters and Career Changers" as well as career specialists, industry professionals and scholars, including Jeremy Rifkin, Doug Henwood, William Bridges, Gene Amdahl and top executives from Sun Microsystems, Citibank and others.
On camera host and instructor Rebecca Haddock, M.Ed., NCC is a licensed career counselor at the University of San Diego and provides employment and educational advising to the military, high schools, community colleges and social service agencies.

PROGRAM DESCRIPTIONS

SECTION I: SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND EXPLORATION: WHAT DO I REALLY WANT?

1) Introduction
Introduces students to the three main components of the career development process: 1) Self Knowledge and Exploration; 2) Career Educational Exploration; and 3) Career Planning and Implementation. Students will meet the "real people" who will describe their career decision-making experiences throughout the coming episodes. They will also meet some of the experts including Richard Bolles, Jeremy Rifkin, Barbara Sher and Howard Figler.

2) Where Are You Now?
Introduces students to the Donald Super's concept of life roles and the importance of having support systems. Students evaluate their satisfaction with their current life roles-work, home and family, leisure, self-improvement and community, and begin to identify key people in their personal support system.

3) Self-Knowledge and Beliefs
Presents simple methods for expanding self-awareness, and introduced to the connections between their beliefs, their attitudes and their subsequent behaviors. Students practice techniques for identifying personal beliefs about their ability to be successful by listening to their self-talk, and begin to develop their Personal Career Profile.

4) Values
Discusses the relationship between students' values and the choices they make each day and the way the values relate to career decisions. Students begin to identify some of their key values and consider how their family background may have shaped their values.

5) Personality & Interests
Demonstrates the connections between personality, interests and work preferences such as working with information, ideas, people and things. Students begin to identify their primary interest patterns and aspects of their personality through various exercises.

6) Knowledge, Skills & Abilities
Explores the differences between knowledge, skills and abilities and presents the basic skills required by today's employers identified by the U.S. Department of Labor SCANS Report. Students learn to identify their skills through examining past accomplishments and to consider how skill development may be influenced by societal or cultural pressures.

7) Keeping Track of Self-Knowledge and Exploration
Expands students' Personal Career Profiles by identifying preferred values and interests, and by identifying current skills as well as skills they want to develop in the future.

SECTION II - CAREER AND EDUCATIONAL EXPLORATION: WHAT'S OUT THERE FOR ME?

8) Introduction to Career and Educational Exploration
Explores contemporary changes in the economy and the world of work. The lesson introduces three principal changes-technology, globalization, and changing workforce demographics. Students review a variety of strategies for coping with these changes including considering new work options such as self-employment and contract work, and the need for lifelong learning.

9) The Changing Workplace: Technology & Globalization
Focuses on how technology has changed the kind of work we do, how work is done, and where work can be done. Students are introduced to the concept of global business and the skills essential to stay employable in a global economy.

10) What Employers Want: Skills and Attitudes
Introduces students to the skills an attitudes essential for success in today's workplace-competence, communication, adaptability, group effectiveness, and influence. Students learn to identify their transferable skills, and evaluate their degree of work readiness.

11) What's Out There: How the World of Work is Organized?
Probes the distinctions and similarities between industries and functions. Several primary industries and job functions are described giving students insight into how their interests can offer clues to industries or types of work that they might enjoy.

12) Generating Career Options
Presents a variety of strategies for generating a list of career possibilities. Students are encouraged to brainstorm ideas and emphasize quantity over quality of ideas at this stage of the process.

13) Researching Career Options: New Technologies and Current Techniques
Explores career options using both print and electronic sources of occupational information. Students learn the components of a research strategy and are presented with the categories of key information to help them focus their research efforts.

14) Informational Interviewing and Networking
Demonstrates how using networking and informational interviewing can help them to learn more about careers which interest them. Students learn how to identify networking opportunities and potential networking contacts, and develop a strategy for conducting informational interviews.

15) Evaluating Career Options
Presents to students the "Three C's", a framework for evaluating career options using content, conditions and compensation. Students use information from their Personal Career Profiles to identify their own preferred content, conditions and compensation and begin to compare their preferences to information gathered from their occupational research.

16) Overcoming Barriers to Employment
Introduces students to some of the legal issues related to discrimination in hiring and in the workplace, as well as some techniques for confronting, challenging and coping with discrimination. In addition, students are presented with questions they can ask to gauge a company's corporate culture and commitment to diversity.

17) Lifelong Learning
Looks at the range of educational options students may consider using to reach their occupational goals, including vocational training, community college, undergraduate and graduate degrees. In addition, students are presented with the benefits of experiential education such as coops and internships, and the need for lifelong learning to keep skills current.

SECTION III: CAREER PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION: HOW DO I GET WHAT I WANT?

18) Introduction to Career Planning and Implementation
Introduces the implementation phase of the course and provides an overview of the next steps, including making a career decision, deciding on an action plan and launching the search for work opportunities. It also presents and debunks common myths or misperceptions about the job search process.

19) Decision Making Strategies
Examines both rational-linear and intuitive decision-making strategies. Students begin to asses their personal decision making style and gain insight into how their values, willingness to take risks, and ability to be objective may influence their decision making process. Finally, it introduces students to a strategy for using their personal priorities to guide their decision making.

20) Goal Setting & Action Planning
Gives students criteria for attainable goals and objectives-specific, measurable, realistic, and meaningful-and practice evaluating goals on the basis of these criteria. Students begin to draft their own goals and action plans for implementing their search.

21) Finding Work Opportunities: New Technologies and Current Techniques
Focuses on finding work opportunities by accessing the hidden job market through networking. It guides students in the developing a networking statement and presents the advantages of several methods of finding work, including cold calls, employment agencies, temporary assignments, internships and volunteer positions.

22) Staying on Track In Your Work Search
Covers a variety of stress management and time management techniques that can help students who may be experiencing stress and having difficulty staying motivated . The program offers suggestions on how to stay focused and on track.

23) Resume Preparation
Covers the development and use of both chronological and functional resumes. Students draft accomplishment statements using action verbs and emphasizing the result they produced.

24) Interviewing Strategies
Introduces the three essential steps to interview preparation-know yourself, know the position, and know the company. Students consider their responses to some typical interview questions and learn the STAR (Situation-Task-Action-Result) framework for describing their accomplishments to employers.

25) Interview Follow-up
Outlines the specific steps students should follow immediately after an interview, such as writing a thank you letter, and later, such as maintaining their network and keeping momentum in their work search. The program also suggests strategies for turning a rejection into a positive and useful experience.

26) Series Conclusion
Reviews several methods for getting unstuck and staying on track while looking for work opportunities, and presents strategies such as ongoing self-assessments, for building and managing a successful career. Students draft one-year, ten-year and lifetime goals to help them build a vision for the future.