by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jul 1, 2011 | Career Skills, Higher Education, interviews, Job Search, Student Affairs, transferable skills
Understanding how skills you have gained in Student Affairs will benefit you in any position is critical if you plan to advance in your career. I serve on the steering committee for AthFest, a non-profit organization that plans the local music and arts festival each summer, the Athens GA Half-Marathon in the Fall, and year-round art and music education events for local children. The festival was last week and I put many of the skills I gained working in Student Affairs to good use.
Candidates will often be asked to give examples of times when they planned a program, dealt with a difficult person or situation, or responded to a crisis. This week, I will give some examples from my recent experiences during AthFest. I will do my best to explain them in a loose P-A-R (Problem-Action-Resolution) style, to emulate the way that candidates should use in their interviews.
Part 3: Crisis Management
One of my favorite questions to ask Residence Life candidates is related to crisis management. Sure, Residence Life is a "generalist" role in many ways, but if we specialize in anything, it's crisis management. The ability to respond quickly and calmly to potentially dangerous situations and ensure the safety of students and staff supersedes everything else. This was a running theme throughout my career. I dealt with suicidal students, guns in the residence halls, a riot, drug dealers, sexual assaults, suicide attempts and completed suicides, power outages, bats in the residence halls, and multiple facility issues. I was trained by the Red Cross in Emergency Shelter Operations and for a while, I was responsible for oversight of Residence Life's Emergency Plan and related training for all the professional staff and RAs. As a result, handling crises comes as a second nature to me.
Good thing, too, because emergencies come on their own schedule, and they don't usually announce themselves ahead of time. This was the case last Friday, when lightning struck a column on the corner of the Trappeze Pub on Washington Street, and rained bricks onto the street and three people below: the manager of the pub, a man on the patio of the neighboring pub, and one of our business vendors.
People were screaming and running away through the rain, and I heard one lady yell to me "You've gotta call the festival! You've gotta call it!' She kept running away, but like most people who handle emergencies, I ran toward the commotion. First, I went to the volunteer area to see if other staff knew what had happened, because it wasn't clear where the lightning had struck. Someone said they heard it had struck Trappeze, so I rushed back, to find gawkers looking up at loose bricks that might fall at any minute, and scavengers (some adult, some children, some drunk, and some just curious) collecting the bricks. I went in and asked Aaron, the Trappeze manager, if he was aware of the situation (he looked confused, which I later learned from him was the result of him being one of the people bricks rained on. We laughed about that, and he asked why I hadn't noticed the cement dust in his hair.) I then told him I would like to barricade the area off, and would try to keep scavengers from stealing bricks. He agreed it was a good idea and thanked me. I went out, got one volunteer to stand in the area and shoo people away, and two others to help me get barricades.
We returned, and I ordered onlookers away, telling them the area was unsafe, and worked with staff and police to secure the area and later, to get signs posted. I made two newspapers, talked to a nice reporter from the Red and Black, and as is common when talking to student reporters, got slightly misquoted, but not badly enough to ask for a retraction. Then I spent the next three hours talking to the bar owner, the people hit by bricks, Athfest central staff and the Police.
Student Affairs Skills Used:
- The ability to remain calm and move quickly into assessing the situation and taking action to ensure safety of people and security of the area first.
- Thinking on my feet about who should know about a situation, and reporting the details to proper authorities.
- Following up about the safety of those involved.
- Answering questions when approached by the media and referring them to the proper persons.
- Having a sense of humor after the fact, and appreciating that the situation could have been worse, but that the response was the best one available at the time.
- Looking forward, I plan to ask the steering committee to debrief the incident and to consider writing up an emergency plan (which I will offer to coordinate.)
Questions for Your Consideration
- Do you have a good example of a time when you handled a crisis?
- What did you do to respond?
- How was the problem resolved?
- What questions are important to ask yourself, when deciding how to respond to a crisis?
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jun 30, 2011 | Career Skills, Higher Education, Job Search, Student Affairs, transferable skills
Applying transferable skills you have gained in Student Affairs will benefit you in any position as you advance in your career. I serve on the steering committee for AthFest, a non-profit organization that plans the local music and arts festival each summer, the Athens GA Half-Marathon in the Fall, and year-round art and music education events for local children. The festival was last week and I applied many of the skills I gained working in Student Affairs.
Candidates are often asked to give examples of times when they planned a program, dealt with a difficult person or situation, or responded to a crisis. This week, I will give some examples from my recent experiences during AthFest. I will do my best to explain them in a loose P-A-R (Problem-Action-Resolution) style, to emulate the way that candidates should approach describing their transferable skills in their interviews.
Part 2: Dealing with Difficult People and Situations
It probably won't surprise anyone that I encountered the most difficult situations (and the most difficult people) during artist and vendor arrival and departure. The first area I addressed in planning the artist market was to introduce barricade passes for all artists, vendors, and staff, and to explain the rules, and have all of these people fill out a brief web form saying they understood and would comply with the rules before sending them the passes. Barricade duty was a major logjam in the past. This year, it wasn't, and things went very smoothly. I borrowed this idea from the Welcome Week Committee at Penn State, which started doing something similar a few years back to help sort out traffic and help filter it to the appropriate zones and residence halls. I knew everyone wouldn't follow instructions but that many would. The result: smooth move-in and move out for all but a few vendors. (The difficult people were the ones that didn't follow instructions.) Here are a couple of situations I dealt with and how the problems were resolved.
People Parking in the Wrong Area
There are a few universal truths to any parking equation. First, parking is always limited to an amount below the expectation of the people parking. Second, for most event planners, it's also beyond our control, so we get put in the awkward position of apologizing for how things are, because we can't apologize to the person complaining for how unrealistic their expectations are, and even if we could, they would find it insulting.
Some problems I dealt with during the festival:
- People parking in someone else's spot while unloading. In these cases, it wasn't that there wasn't another place for the other person to park. On several occasions, people parked in the assigned booth space of another artist. Imagine the complaints you'd get during arrival if some student went into their room and found someone had parked their VW Beetle on one side of the room while setting up the other side (invariably the one with the bigger closet, or nearer to the window.) Just like I would do when I was in Residence Life, I gently pointed out the issue and asked the offender to move as soon as possible, and the offended party to be patient as the problem was really just a result of congestion, and not of intentional ill-will or a desire to take over their territory.
- People blocking the main entry and fire lane, and abandoning their cars, thereby causing a logjam of angry people. For the most part, people had the barricade passes in their windows and were easy to find, so I found them and asked them to move, or enlisted other staff to help do so. The result: no major delays in loading and unloading, once inside the festival area.
People confused about or unhappy with their booth assignment
Anyone who ever worked in Residence Life can tell you that the most stressful and time-consuming situations that happen on arrival day have to do with assignments. This is also true for festivals. Some examples:
- People being confused about their assignment. I dealt with several artists who couldn't find their spaces, or who moved into the wrong space. Some of these were accidents, due to people misreading the painted and chalked-in lines on the pavement. In these cases, I offered the parties involved the option to trade spots or to have assistance moving their tent, displays and art to the correct location.
- People unhappy about their assignment. One artist was upset about another accidentally taking her spot, and even more unhappy that the other artist's spot was by the porta-potties. Her answer? Pick another spot altogether, and express frustration at our intern. I was called in to speak with her and offered her help to move to either of the assigned spots. She asked why she couldn't move to the third spot, and I told her that I wasn't bringing an uninvolved third party into the scenario. She unhappily accepted help moving, and expressed her frustrations toward me. I explained that I had offered her help, and that if she was unhappy with the options I could give her, I would happily refund her money and help her pack up and leave. This is one of the great differences from Residence Life, where I would have had to refer difficult people like her to my supervisor. How nice would it have been if I'd been able to tell every student who tried to game the system over my 15 years in Residence Life that I'd help them pack and give them a refund for the pleasure of not having to deal with bad behavior and insults? The artist relented and later I apologized anyway, and gave her some free beer tickets, and we were copacetic. You can't do that in Residence Life, either. (But wouldn't it be great?)
Some Take-Aways
- Most people will try to follow directions if you give them ahead of time and make it convenient and easy. The barricade passes were the best example of this. Almost every artist and vendor had theirs and passed through smoothly. Those who didn't were apologetic. This was a nice change from previous years, when artists and vendors got in frequent arguments with the barricade worker. We didn't have a single incident like that this year.
- No matter how much you plan ahead of time and explain something, there will be difficult people who ignore it, don't understand what to do, or simply decide to do their own thing. You can't control what other people do, only how you respond. Those who ignored directions were the cause of most of the issues we experienced. Most of these situations were resolved easily and quickly once I explained them. Those that weren't were resolved later with beer tickets and apologies for the inconvenience (not for the issue itself.)
- It's nice when you can resolve a difficult situation at the lowest possible level of an organization. Remember this during fall arrival and give your student staff and entry-level professionals some latitude. You'll probably be pleased with the results.
Questions for Your Consideration
- Do you have any good examples of times you dealt with difficult people or situations?
- What did you do to resolve these issues?
- What were the results? How was the issue was resolved?
- How do you relate your transferable skills when applying for new positions?
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jun 24, 2011 | Career Skills, Coaching, Higher Education, life purpose, Site News, work/life balance
How many times in your career have you faced a decision where there was a good job in front of you (maybe even offered to you) and you knew it was a terrible fit, or that the benefits outweighed the costs? This has happened several times to me, and luckily, in most cases, I had the good sense to walk away.
In those cases when I didn’t, though, I took a job and was miserable. It’s also happened that I took jobs and the jobs changed, or my interests changed at a different pace than the jobs (or institutions) adapted to change. In cases like these, it’s best to know what you are not.
In this vein, I want to clearly describe what I am not, and what Higher Ed Career Coach is not.
- I am not strictly a professional blogger. First and foremost, I am a professional career coach, organizational consultant and speaker. The blogging supports the dissemination of my ideas, of my perspectives on career strategy, and serves as a marketing vehicle for my coaching programs and services (individual and group coaching, webinars, information products, etc.)
- I am not an advertising professional, and this is not a “job search” site. You cannot find job listings here, and I have no intention of becoming a job board, in part because that is a saturated market, and in part because I believe that sector of the advertising marketplace is dying, as the web 1.0 model of “job boards” is being replaced by social advertising.
- I am not a conventional information marketer. I am an educator and a coach. Anything I sell through this site will be:
- Educational (i.e., based in philosophy but instructional in nature and delivery)
- Reflect my personal and professional perspectives as a reformed educator, critic, strategist, and an educational reformer (i.e., an outsider from the inside, now looking back in, and commenting on what is good and what is broken)
- Concerned with convergence of ideas, lessons from other industries and fields, and real-world factors, including economic factors, political concerns, and the environment.
- Intelligent, in that readers can expect articles to be generally written at or above the college reading level. My assumption as publisher is that my readers are smart, not easily confused, and engaged in the development of coherent and well-rounded perspectives on a variety of topics. The Flesch reading ease score for all submissions is available to me as editor and publisher, and most articles on the site rate as “difficult” or above. Articles are not revised for that reason, as long as uses of grammar and spelling are appropriate. Articles appearing here assume that the reader is an academic professional, member of the faculty, or someone capable of functioning in those capacities, so articles will not be “dumbed down.”
- Social, in that topics that relate to social networking and intelligence, and how they play into job searches and career planning, will be regular features. Understanding how to create a socially intelligent career strategy is a core concept of this site, and in most cases, coverage of other topics will also include ways to approach those topics in socially intelligent, relevant and appropriate ways.
- A good-humored, good-natured and personal brand. I want this site, and my corporate brand to reflect my values and the values of everyday educators who work in the trenches and persevere in living lives of service and commitment, despite the many and growing challenges of modern higher education.
The site’s values are drawn from the well of my experience, my commitment to the core values mentioned above, and my belief that the best answers are rooted in how individuals, institutions, businesses (including independent small businesses like my own), and personal learning networks work together to raise the collective intelligence of our society and mobilize change through social action.
To be most effective, we need to have a sense of humor as well as a sense of commitment, a belief in the good intentions of others, met with our own good intentions, and brought to life and to action by the power of personal relationships, common interests, and common goals, and not dictated by traditional methods of business, most importantly closed networks, claims on personal ownership of collective public information, and the sheer pursuit of financial gain at the expense of competitors and the public good.
My financial goals for this site are simple and rooted in the American dream. I want to support my family and spend time with them, support my profession and be able to criticize it, so that it can change and grow. I want to have good conversations with intelligent, kind, committed people. And one day, I want to be able to retire and play with my grandchildren and work in the garden, without being a shriveled up husk of a man, spit out by a system that didn’t understand him and never valued his contributions appropriately. (Which is where I was headed, if I had stayed at Penn State.)
As I mentioned, it’s never been about money. It’s always been about passion for ideas, service to the greater good, and helping people like me live lives of purpose and authenticity
Hopefully this article, and others published recently have cleared up for you what this site is and is not about, and who is or is not responsible for the content herein. If you like the ideals that this site is committed to, please keep reading and join the conversation.
If you are looking for intelligent career strategies to help you move forward in your career, and intelligent ideas for solving the problems of higher education, and you don’t mind the contrarian views, crusty language and occasional humor, then Higher Ed Career Coach is the site for you.
If you just looking for position listings, or run-of-the-mill career advice, visit a job board like HigherEdJobs or Monster.Com, a university human resources page, or LinkedIn.
That’s where I would go, if I were looking for a job, instead of planning a social revolution.
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jun 23, 2011 | Career Skills, Higher Education, life purpose, Site News
In any job search, and indeed, any business, an understanding of convergence will help you to contrast yourself from the “competition.” Potential employers or potential clients need to understand how you are different, but they will make decisions based on perceptions that you are a better fit for their needs, or a better value for their budget. To stand out, you need to explain your Unique Value Proposition, and start building your personal brand in alignment with it. This makes it clear where their needs converge with your own. This point of convergence is your potential point of agreement. I’d like to share the approaches I have taken, and open up a conversation about how to differentiate yourself from competitors.
When it came time to put some names to things, I began researching potential site names, to make sure that I could contrast myself against others trying to reach the same market. I followed the advice of several well-known bloggers and began by searching for preferred names and seeing which ones were already taken. Then I searched on terms that might mean something similar, but were not taken.
Then I combined related terms to come up with a new semantic term that did not have any results or competition. This is called working from the “long tail.” The idea is that by creating a convergent idea and a new term to go with it, you can stake out some digital claim to use of the new terms, and work to connect deeply with a smaller market. This was the case for “higher ed life coach” and “higher ed career coach” in July 2009, so I moved ahead on registration.
I had already eliminated many options because they were already taken, or seemed similar to names that already existed. I would have loved to use the words “college” or “student affairs” in my site names, but most of the good names were taken. I thought about other terms that might be appealing and settled on “higher ed.” This made sense because it was not well-worn digital ground, and because few people outside of the career field referred to the field as “higher ed,” instead using the terms “university administration” and “faculty” to describe working in the field. For all the great terms related to “college life,” they seemed to be locked up by admissions advisors, and people trying to sell lifestyle merchandise to college students. So, while it may have seemed boring to many, I chose titles that described my target audience and what I hoped to do.
I won’t claim to be the only person working in higher education that can provide solid career advice. I read other blogs, including Mama PhD, Eric Stoller’s Blog, Insider Higher Ed, Higher Ed Jobs, BreakDrink, On the Go with Ed Cabellon, and many others. I won’t claim to be the only life coach or career coach working with college students and higher ed professionals. There are many others out there doing the same things, and who have been doing so for many years.
I will say that I believe myself to be the first person with a national brand premise based on providing these types of services primarily for higher education audiences. I say this because I did the research for quite a while before betting my career on it. My brand premise and the promise that comes with it is unique, and in describing it in the way I did, publicly and as early as July 2009, I opened up a new niche in both the coaching industry and in higher education, by creating a new sector called higher ed coaching. I’ve been providing advice and coaching services under these brand names since 2009, and gaining ground. I won’t claim to have universal appeal, but readership has been climbing steadily, and my network has been growing. It’s clear that I am on to something.
So clear in fact, that I’ve been identified by some as a promising player in the coaching industry and in higher education, and by others in both fields as a threat to the status quo. I’ll explain more about that as it becomes necessary and appropriate, but for now I want to concentrate on the Unique Value Proposition of this site, its brand promise, and the services and programs that go with it. I’m not really concerned with what others are doing. There’s room on this stage for many players and I believe in improvisation and cooperation. I also believe in the unique nature of what it is I am trying to do, and in my motivations for doing them.
My name is Sean Cook and I am the original and only genuine Higher Ed Career Coach™. It is my personal coaching brand, and is supported by web properties and coaching programs and services that support my personal brand. I am solely responsible for the content of these sites, and not affiliated with any other corporation or individual coach or consultant, unless you read a specific disclosure indicating otherwise. Higher Ed Career Coach™ is my personal brand.
The Higher Ed Career Coach™ brand is…
- An Outsider brand, based in part on the idea that the higher education system and industry is broken and unable to adapt to the realities of the modern economy, political landscape, and the changing nature of learning and communication.
- A Convergent brand, based on the idea that fixing the problems of higher education will require adaptation, and that adaptation will only happen when those inside the broken ecosystem of education look outside their ivory towers and embrace open-system thinking, as well as new ways to construct and support learning and communication.
- An Intelligent brand, based on the belief that creating opportunities for understanding, reflection, research and debate are key to solving the problems of higher education.
- A Social brand, committed to the belief that intelligent networking and awareness of network resources will create opportunities for new knowledge and practice.
- Good-humored, Good-Natured and Personal, based on the value of relationships, and not measured by the value of business transactions conducted.
How would you describe the different core aspects of your personal brand? And what do you think about mine? Did I forget anything? What do you think I can do to reinforce the ideals above? Do you find them appealing?
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jun 22, 2011 | Career Skills, Higher Education, life purpose, Site News
Over the last five years, I’ve experienced a convergence of events in my personal life that drove me to consider the need to change my circumstances and with it, hopefully my personal and professional destiny. First I became a father. Then I learned that I have a neurological disorder, which affects my mobility and is aggravated by stress. Then I had a year where my whole staff hated me, and I couldn’t dig myself easily out of the personal and professional hole I found myself in. Then some things changed, and I was able to do so. Others were not able to, and chose to move on.
I took the next few years to redeem myself and to redouble my efforts to be an effective supervisor and mentor, and I feel that I was able to do so. I began researching options that would allow me to move on from Penn State and the first option was a doctoral program at the University of Georgia. I was invited to interview, but not admitted to the program. What little feedback I received amounted to the fact that I had expressed more practical than theoretical interests. It hurt at first, but I was eventually able to glean a lesson from the experience, move past it, and to start getting more specific about what other options I wanted to research.
It was a blessing in disguise, because in that exploration, I realized that my interests do not lie in the direction of teaching student development theory. I’m more interested in helping professionals understand effective practice, and effective professional involvement, so they can move forward in their careers with authenticity of purpose, and have satisfying (and balanced) careers and lives. Coming to Athens also made me realize how much I always wanted to live there, and how much better it would be for my family if I moved closer to both my parents in South Carolina, and my partner’s parents in Florida.
When I decided on pursuing coaching as a career choice, I initially wanted to do life and transition coaching for college students, and transition coaching for their parents, because I had been really troubled by Millennial students and their helicopter parents. I also had an interest in doing career coaching for persons working in higher ed, because I could have used it going into the field, and later as a supervisor and member of the central management staff for Residence Life at Penn State. I know for a fact that many of my staff (students and professionals) needed it, but that as a supervisor, I could only give them so much, because of the power differential involved in supervision. I believed that, as an experienced professional with a lot of great experience as a supervisor, as a candidate, and a member of search and interview committees, I had a unique set of gifts to put to work, and that by doing so, I could make a difference in the careers of many people. So I rolled the dice, left my job, and gambled that I would be able to pull together these convergent ideas into a coherent business concept.
In my mind, I have all the pieces tied together and it makes sense. But I haven’t explained it so well, and it’s clear that I need to, so that people won’t get confused or stay confused, because it’s not enough to explain the convergence, you have to explain the separate ideas before you show how they all come together. As a storyteller, I’ve always understood that. So I’m going to back up a little bit, as I have been doing so far this week, and tell you, as best I can, my story.
I’m not doing this so just to talk about myself. In putting forth my life examples, I’m hoping that you will relate, and see, in your circumstances, some parallels, and find some lessons you can apply to your life and career.
In every story, there are lessons worth finding and questions worth asking. And we can definitely learn more if we have some conversations. So please comment freely and share your story, ask questions, and tell me and your fellow readers your story and more about the points of convergence where you exist, operate, and feel most comfortable.
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jun 21, 2011 | Career Skills, Coaching, Higher Education
The unfortunate reality of being a convergent is that people don’t get you. As I mentioned last week in my posts on game theory, convergents are hard to “get” because people try too hard to fit them neatly into their own boxes (or circles) and to define what they know and what they do in familiar terms.
Convergents are not happy when constrained by familiarity and party-line thinking. They like to learn what others are doing, and integrate new knowledge, practices, and ideas into their own personal frameworks. They are those who give birth to new ideas and ways of doing things.
Convergent thinking and convergent practice have always been at the center of my personal journey and progress. The idea for Higher Ed Career Coach was born out of convergence of my personal and professional circumstances, and what I recognized as the needs of a field straining to adapt to the realities of reduced budgets, economic pressures of the marketplace, the changing expectations of Millennials coming into the workplace, and the impacts of new technology and social media, upon the education industry’s ecosystem.
I’d reached a point in my career when I knew…absolutely knew that the system as a whole was broken, and that my personal circumstances were a great example of what was wrong with the system. I also knew that my frustration with that fact was going to ruin me and my career. So the best thing I could do, for myself, my employer, and for the profession, was to move on.
But I had a strong commitment to the profession, and a strong belief that I could be a part of the broader discussions that would move our institutions and our field forward. So I founded my websites and began developing my personal brand as a life and career coach for persons in higher education. I’d been talking about becoming a coach on and off for five or six years at that point, but had finally taken some practical steps to research coach training programs and to really work on understanding the best way to become certified through a reputable program and to make a radical career change. That’s my story. What’s yours?
- What points of convergence have led you to new discoveries in your career?
- How can you bring together your personal interests into a career concept that will help you move forward?
- What can you do to drive change in higher education?
- Are you doing those things?
