According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the current economy, Americans shift jobs every 4-5 years, which translates into 8-10 job transitions, including several career changes, over one’s life time. With competition for jobs on the rise, a person’s continuing employability and career success are increasingly defined by his or her mastery of individual career development and the ability to effectively "manage oneself" (P. Drucker). In this course, you will learn how to think strategically and professionally about your career self-management. Through this course you'll develop an objective, external view of your marketable skills as a solid foundation for building a strong career brand. In particular, you'll be able to: - explain why developing a protean and boundaryless career perspective based on transferable (portable) skills is advantageous for continuing employability and career growth; - design your portable skills portfolio, identify and examine critically important competencies underpinning your transferable skills, and analyze your career self-management competency gaps; - increase self-awareness, pinpoint your career goals, and envision your future work self; - recognize the central role of self-management for developing transferable, marketable, skills and create a customized self-management information system (Career Development Lab) for ongoing personal development and professional growth; - conduct a thorough, competency-based job analysis in your area of interest and examine practices of evidence-based, data-driven competitive employee selection; -implement your newly developed skills for crafting effective selection criteria statements and refining your job applications.
Employability: An Interview with Tom Lindsley
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Do curso por The State University of New York
Strategic Career Self-Management
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Understanding careers and career skills
Managing and branding your career to align with a dynamic employment landscape, and with your personal interests, values, and goals requires ongoing skill development. In Week 2, you will learn how to develop a skill-based view of yourself, with particular attention to transferable skills. Using a competency framework, you will examine your knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes as they relate to your career self-management.
You instructor for this week is Michele Forte. CDL Workout facilitators are Amy Giaculli and Val Chukhlomin.
Conheça os instrutores
Dr. Valeri ChukhlominProfessor
SUNY Empire State College
Dr. Michele ForteAssistant Professor, SUNY Empire State College
Community and Human Services
Dr. Kymn Harvin RutiglianoAssistant Professor
SUNY Empire State College
Dr. John M. Beckem IIAssistant Professor of Finance and Management Studies
State University of New York, Empire State College
Dr. Tonka JokelovaCoordinator of Curriculum and Instructional Design
SUNY Empire State College
Amy GiaculliAssessment Specialist
SUNY Empire State College
[MUSIC]
So hi everyone, just to remind you my name is Dr. Michele Forte,
I'm an assistant professor with Suny Empire State college in New York.
And I'm very pleased to be joined this afternoon by Tom Lindsley,
Tom is the director of federal government relations for
ACT in Washing DC, and he has most generously,
is willing to, [LAUGH] is willing to share his expertise with
us today with respect to some of the topics we're covering.
So Tom, welcome, thank you so much for joining us today.
>> Thanks for the invitation.
>> Yeah, no, we're thrilled.
So, I wonder if you could start by just giving our learners or
viewers a sense of your background, what brought you to this work,
and maybe we can just start with that as a context and go from there.
>> Sure, I work in Washington as a satellite office
of ACT based in Iowa City.
It's a national nonprofit working with individuals,
helping them kind of achieve both education, but work for success as well.
Provides a whole variety of sources of information and research, and
tools to help individuals identify the skills they need or the skills they have.
My own background, I was a liberal arts major so there is some hope there.
And I got started by working on a political
campaign after school, after I finished my graduate degree.
And was able to meet a number of states political delegation and
got a job, shortly after that.
>> Mm-hm.
>> More of an internship job, but that led one thing to another,
to begin to learn the intricacies of the federal legislative
policy making processes that could help me move into in effect
a lobbying position, working with government there.
So that's how I got there basically and I,
we'll come back to that move from school to job by having some sort of demo,
demonstrable experience in the workplace as we move along here.
>> That's great, that's great.
So thank you.
So you've given us then a little bit of a hint of your trajectory.
So I wonder then if you could speak to ACT, the issues maybe that ACT
hopes to respond to what challenges is it trying to solve?
Give us an overview maybe of the organization.
>> Sure, ACT,
it works all along the continuum of education and work force development.
So we have research and tools available to educators of K-12 space
transitioning from grade eight to middle school, middle school to high school.
High school transitioning to secondary education as well as job training.
And tools to help individuals all across those difficult transitions and times.
So it involves, researching, merging, and
ongoing issues, that need help to overcome.
Providing the tools that we feel are based on evidence and
research that will help people.
>> Mm-hm.
>> It's all based on omega science and research protocols.
We have a whole army of industrial psychologists and
psychometricians who help build these tools with a lot of integrity.
So what we find by individuals using the solutions is very
helpful in building a database, available publicly for
others to look at, and sort of assess their own skills or
career interests really along the trajectory of those
research dimensions that we have.
So, ACT is, it is a national non-profit, so we really are mission driven.
And that drives our research and our curiosity,
trying to stay ahead of these rapidly growing segments of society.
The rapid change in the workplace as well as the different skill
levels that are needed even to succeed in post secondary education.
>> Mm-hm.
Yeah, so that last piece to which you just referred,
the sort of the rapidity with which this landscape,
I guess with a capital L, changes.
I think that's really interesting and it speaks to some of the topics
we've discussed, even in this first part of our course.
So, I guess I'm interested in how you use your phrase,
psychometrics, and I think we'll, maybe, get back to that in a little bit.
But I wonder how given that changing, shifting landscape, given the sort of,
now we're 15 years into the 21st century, but we still appeal to the 21st century.
How do organizations like ACT work with industry,
work with job seekers, work with higher ed?
And then sort of balancing what each group maybe has to offer,
what each group can learn from one another.
It sounds like a little bit of a balancing act.
You're trying to get from one group to inform another.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
>> Yeah, it is based largely on insuring that our work has validity.
>> Right.
>> Has, is anchored in the real world.
>> Mm-hm.
>> But a world not only fir expectations, but real world standards.
Team member levels, etcetera.
So, as an example, I'll give you two examples.
One, is the transition from high school to post secondary institutes
where we every three years update our, what we call a National Curriculum Survey.
And it's a very detailed effort that researches secondary
school teachers as well as post secondary entry level
course teachers to match their expectations and
their judgement of the readiness of their students.
And we always find it a mismatch.
Largely mismatches that high school teachers feel their students are ready for
post secondary education.
Up in the 80% range for secondary instructors who get these students into
first year credit they're in college.
Their credit bearing courses will say that 23% of
them will agree that they're ready for college work so it's a huge mismatch, and
then we have to define what comprises that mismatch?
What content levels are missing?
What knowledge needs to be enriched?
What increased levels of knowledge
need to be addressed in order to balance out that respect?
And that results in setting academic benchmarks or
readiness coming out of high school.
And that enables our researchers then to back map those benchmarks into the earlier
grades so that you have some tools to see whether you're on track to be ready.
By the time you graduate from high school.
Similarly, in order to ensure that workforce solutions
are helpful to individuals trying to get into the workforce.
Instead of gathering a lot of smart experts around the table in a particular
industry, for example, and say well what skills do you need.
We actually entered the workplace and worked with those individuals who
hold those jobs to define the exact skills that are essential to succeed in that job.
>> Mm-hm. >> We're able to identify those skills for
the employer even.
We're able to determine the relative priority of those skills among each other.
>> Mm-hm. >> That's some of the most
important [INAUDIBLE].
And also to determine what level of [INAUDIBLE] are essential for
succeeding in that job and they can put together
a lot of detail Research and information about jobs across the country.
And over a period of decades, we've been able to accumulate these individual
analyses of jobs into a a national database and
we find common threads among [INAUDIBLE] employers
need across all of those jobs and that helps define some of the tools
we're able to provide individuals in navigating that landscape.
And we're constantly updating that database, because there are all new
occupations coming on every year, skills that are needed and
that all needs to be built into the database.
>> All right. Yeah. So, I think those are really great examples because it
demonstrates the complexity of your task.
So you're sort of, I think you used the phrase back mapping.
So you're thinking about where today, I'll just choose a random grade.
Maybe today is seventh grader or sixth grader, fifth grader,
might need to be at the time she graduates
from high school in order to be ready whatever that next transition is.
Right?
Which would necessitate some pretty well
researched intelligence about what that landscape will look like when
that graduate student arrives on the scene and then
currently you're having to take a look at that 60, I think it's 60% mismatch.
[LAUGH] Which between what teachers think their students can do and
what actually end up presenting.
I mean that's a pretty significant mismatch between the two.
So that's I think the research piece that you're doing and
other organizations like yours are doing is crucial
to help all of us translate what we're doing in one venue to another.
>> I would agree.
The more information you have, that you are going to be able to navigate that
landscape and frankly that's becoming a more important
skill for individuals coming out of their educational experience and
their educational career, having the skills to be able to navigate
the world you're entering for whatever you want to do is an important skill.
>> Right.
>> Finding the information resource.
>> Right.
>> [INAUDIBLE] the people who can help you most.
>> Yeah, no, that's really interesting and it's something we've
thought a lot about as well, so it's not only the actual competencies or
knowledge or skills, but it's the ability to do all that to begin with.
So there's sort of the skill on top of the skill set, it's the navigation, and
arming people with the navigation.
So, speaking of skills and competencies.
What, in your estimation or
to your research, are some of those skills and competencies?
It sounds like you've had some pretty interesting results.
With respect to distilling down,
what presents over and over again is, so we hear, portable skills,
transferable skills, etc., can you speak to that just a little bit?
>> Yeah.
The skills that emerged from our research that are common.
[INAUDIBLE] most occupational fields are the kind of
skills that [INAUDIBLE] probably [INAUDIBLE].
I'll give you an example of another document to look at where a broad range
of occupational industry groups got together to identify the core skills
that they look for in their occupational fields, and distilled the commonalities
among [INAUDIBLE] into a single document and that's available publicly, as well.
>> Mm-hm. >> We'll be able to provide that resource.
But the kinds of skills that we asses regularly for
employers ,for individuals to kind of determine where they might need to work on
their skills are divided generally between what we call cognitive skills.
That are things such as thinking, and reasoning, and remembering,
as well as the conscious, intellectual skills, what you know.
>> Mm-hm. >> And then, the non-cognitive skills,
which are a little harder to define,
but they're the ones that are called the soft skills.
They're associated with an individual's attitudes.
They're habits, they're behaviors, they're disciplines and
those are a different set of skills, but increasingly important skills,
that employers look for in hiring individuals into the workplace.
So, to back, go back to the cognitive categories of skills.
Which you know that seem most common across any occupational
field we find relate to applied mathematics.
A very basic of foundation in mathematics in ways that can be applied to
the tasks and problems you face in ordinary workplace, budget.
Another is what we call waiting for information,
and this is the ability to read a lot of information you'll find in the workplace,
distill the essential elements out of it.
Be it a corporate wide memo, for example, and
know exactly what the new policies are corporate wide etcetera.
>> [LAUGH] And finally a category of skills that, for lack of a better term,
we call locating information, but it's not, as simple as that.
It's really interesting, all the documentation you find at a workplace,
whether it's pages, tables, charts, blueprints, spreadsheets,
being able to look at the variety of information displays analyze them
learn how to use it to solve the problem Job.
And all of those categories of skills are measurable and
we can do that whole business.
The other kinds of skills, just quickly, that we can assess
deal with applied technology skills, business writing,
listening for understanding, an important skill in the workplace,
teamwork, workplace observation, things like that.
And they correlate almost exact to this what we're,
what I was going to refer to as common employ ability skills in the framework
that was put together by this large group of industry organizations.
That is available online and
it's billed as the skills all employers need no matter where they work.
And it outlines this mix of cognitive,
non-cognitive skills that both employers ay
are essential for success in today's workplace.
>> Yeah, I'm sort of hanging on your every word because sometimes sort of out in
the field, out in this world, there's almost a ubiquitous reference
to non-cognitive scales, whatever the phrasing, whatever the phraseology is.
And then I've heard some in the field say, well, you know,
you can't really measure it, you just sort of know it when you see it right?
The joke is, professors often say, well we know an A paper when we read one,
which is decidedly unhelpful, both to writer and
to anyone who else is trying to replicate your practice, right.
So it sounds to me like you've homed in on some of the important
pieces of what these competencies actually look like, how they express in
the workplace and that they in fact can be learned.
Assuming that my interpretation is correct, could you speak to that or?
>> [LAUGH] Yeah, there are priorities among those
soft skills that employers look for.
Just to illustrate some of the skills that we've identified and
are able to assess, and able to provide curriculum for,
frankly, are things like creativity and
discipline, goodwill, organization and order,
sociability, stability, customer service,
how careful you are in the workplace, in terms of thinking
through what you're going to say before you say it.
Good will, just attitudes towards good will.
Workplace thinking about your business colleagues,
others you've worked with on your team.
So we're able to even look at some of the more negative behaviors,
like absenteeism and
resilience to work stress, things like that.
Those are individual skills.
You can learn how to better those skills on your own.
We have curriculum that helps back that up, as do other people.
I think that those kinds of behaviors, disciplines, habits really, are learnable.
And increasingly, we're finding that educators are building them in
their instructional practices.
In the way they teach, maybe to a project based learning, or work based learning,
where you are experienced with actual employer interaction.
Environments where you can expose students to these kinds of skills that they may
not get if they're isolated in a school environment, just going through lectures,
and writing papers, and doing what they're told to do, but they don't
develop those kinds of interpersonal skills that can increase learning
>> Right.
I'm having a memory, I think, of another conversation you and
I may have had, on another webinar, about warning spreadsheets.
Was it you?
I'm thinking that this is ringing very familiar to me because the conversation
was something like this, so we teach students,
we teach employees in transition, whatever the cohort, skills, etc.
But they're without context, and
it's only on the application of these the knowledge and the skills,
the confidences, that actually, an individual can practice, and hone,
and understand the connection between the theory or the assignment and
what that thing what that bucket looks like in the real world.
And that's where the real competency comes into play.
And without that we're sort of teaching in a void, almost a vacuum.
>> But that's right.
And many students find it hard just to
memorize what they're learning in the classroom without having
used it in some way that [INAUDIBLE] practicality in the real world.
So it increasingly I think the notion of
using applied learning techniques in the classroom is growing in the K-12
education experience, as well as the post-secondary.
We've discussed this before but, in post-secondary education,
particularly education that's leading to a particular career pathway, there is often
greater effort to build partnerships with employers early in an academic
pathway so that individual students can take what they know in the classroom,
or go to their employer and see what that looks like in the workplace.
They get some very practical exposure, or how mathematics for
example are used in technology applications in the workplace or
in control or whatever.
There are much more persuasive instructional techniques
beginning to emerge that focus on what you pointed you,
which the implied learning by use of knowledge that
demonstrates to employers more clearly what your skills are.
>> Right, and probably speaks a little bit more to what
your research shows in terms of competencies and
the characteristics to which employers turned for
potential hire, right a potential employee.
I wonder too, if it would address some of that 60% mismatch that we have between
what students are or are not doing in the classroom, and
then what employers see when individuals turn up for a job.
I think it's really interesting, the applied pieces is a fascinating untapped.
I know that the State University of New York is certainly
charging all of our campuses with applied learning opportunities, and
it sounds like we're in line with what your research is showing.
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