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?
Understanding how skills you have gained in one position will benefit you in another is critical to anyone seeking career advancement. I serve on the steering committee for a local non-profit organization, AthFest, which 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 1: Event Planning and Coordination
The AthFest Music and Arts Festival is a multi-day event, featuring an Artist Market with over 50 vendors, a business and food area with about the same number of vendors, two main stages, two beer tents, a kid’s festival with inflatables, arts and crafts, a comedy night, a film festival and music video awards, and a “club crawl” with over 150 bands during the week of the festival. Planning for the festival occurs year-round.
Problem: Select Approximately 50 artists, Assign Booths Spaces and Keep Them Happy
I serve as the Artist Market Chair. In this capacity, I recruited 2 jury members to review artist applications, and facilitated the jury process using online resources (mostly Google Apps) due to the difficulty of coordinating schedules.
Actions:
I fielded a few hundred inquiries, some of which were clearly not fine art, but commercial products, hobby crafts, or materials made by persons other than the applicant. These I notified of their status, and forwarded to the business vendor contact.
From the rest, we reviewed submissions, debated each on their merits, and accepted over 50 artists to exhibit their work in 47 tent spaces. I coordinated the notification of the artists, their payments to the festival, and their assignment to particular booth spaces, taking into account special requests, and trying to vary the assignments so that artists were not directly beside or across from their direct competition.
I also worked with the business vendor chair and her team to keep business vendors separate from the artist market, and to ensure that we maintained legally mandated fire lanes and points of entry and exit. I coordinated the timing and flow of artist and vendor loading and unloading, traffic control and barricade passes.
During the festival, I worked with two judges to select award recipients and managed all aspects of the market, and other festival “duties as assigned or became necessary.”
Experiences from Student Affairs Used:
Jury: My experience serving on award and scholarship committees in Residence Life and at the Smeal College of Business served me well. It’s always interesting to see how groups come together to work out a process for reviewing applications. I worked with my fellow Judges Pat McCaffrey and Susan Staley to review artist applications and the art samples submitted. I scanned samples of the art and saved pdf files to a Google Docs space and set up a Google spreadsheet for the judges to enter their thoughts. Working from there, I coordinated an e-mail conversation and we accepted some artists, and referred the rest to our business vendor contact, in case they still wanted to show their wares, outside of the juried market.
Booth Assignments: I met with our talented intern, Regan Mulcrone, who did a CAD drawing of the festival using Google Sketchup. We created 3 zones for the booths and designated them according to their placement on upper Washington Street, the area of the festival where all of the Artist Market and KidsFest would be located. During the assignment process, we varied assignments by categories and tried to assure that artists were not right by their direct competition. These are skills I developed in helping with Involvement Fairs, Career Days and of course, roommate assignments.
Traffic Control: At Penn State, I was responsible for a while for Residence Life’s Welcome Week events and for a time, I was directly responsible for managing the logistics involved with getting about 6,500 first-year students, their 240 RAs, nearly 500 Welcome Week Leaders, and the appropriate professional staff to their hall meetings and hall dinners, and then over to the President’s Convocation, and after that, to Late Night Penn State, our alcohol-alternative programming. I was the first person in the history of the event to get all these people to the Bryce Jordan Center on time, so that President Spanier could start his dog-and-pony show, and so that Residence Life could be praised for managing the process, instead of roundly criticized for not doing so. I am extremely proud of that accomplishment, and of the fact that the model I designed is still being used. It has been modified a bit, but the larger framework I built still stands. And Residence Life doesn’t get slammed anymore for being late to the President’s party.
Some Take-Aways
Everything you do teaches you something worthwhile, if you remember it and can integrate it into your skill set.
Your ability to appreciate the skills you have gained and to apply them in new ways is critical toward success in any position.
Even things that seem to be minor accomplishments, 0r footnotes in your career history, can hint at areas of expertise you might develop and apply later in your career.
Questions
What transferable skills have you gained from your work in Higher Education?
How can you explain your experience in ways that show that you appreciate the skills you have gained, and are ready to apply them?
How do you explain your ability to get results?
Do you have appropriate examples of your experiences to discuss in your interviews?
Are you still looking for a job in higher education? If so, my summer coaching special may be for you!
I’ve been having a few issues with getting my sales page done for the summer coaching special, but wanted to let people know the details. Sales pages can come later. The important thing is the offer.
Here it is:
For $50 month for 3 months and the balance $150 within 6 months? ($300 total), here’s what you will get:
4 sessions of 45 minutes to an hour (4 coaching hours) over 3 months-by end of September
Unlimited brief e-mails and phone coaching/catch-ups of 20 minutes or less for 6 months. (until the new year)
Membership in the online group and all activities there, to do on your own, and work out your strategy. I will be participating in the discussions.
Free admission to select job-search webinars and teleseminars for 3 months.
Ability to renew at the same rate for 3 more months if you don’t have a job.
Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied for any reason, as long as you have actively engaged in coaching and activities.
If this sounds okay to you, I can invoice you via PayPal for $50/month for the next 3 months. You would need to pay the PayPal service fees. Or you could send me a check.
Either way, I am hoping there will be interest. I am equipped and ready to take a maximum of 20 job-seekers at any time, so respond now if you are interested. I will have a waiting list, if necessary, but if you need help now, that probably won’t do it for you. So don’t wait!
If all this sounds good, e-mail me at sean@higheredcareercoach.com and I will get you online access to the course and an invitation to the course e-mail list.
I have already had several inquiries without even advertising, so I expect this group to fill quickly. Don’t let that discourage you, but also don’t sit on your hands.
Today’s institutions spend a lot of time assessing environments and making sure they understand them, so that people will feel comfortable and welcome. We also spend a lot of time struggling with ways to promote sustainability and integrate new technology into our approaches. So let’s crash these concepts together to examine the ecology of the job search, and apply the resulting framework to different aspects of the job search.
(This is one of those moments when I’m going to get a little de-constructionist, so if you are not interested in the theory behind this strategy, come back later this week, as we explore some particular issues and strategies you might take when working through them and making intelligent career choices. I’ll try to come full circle by ending with some more practical to-dos for those who don’t care about theory.)
Interview Ecology: Definition
One of the great things about mashing up concepts into something new is that you can make up a term to describe the new concept. So I’m going to call this interview ecology: the study of the co-created environment that exists when persons interact with each other during a search process, and the impacts on the shared environment, when new variables are introduced.
Key questions for consideration
If the job search process is an ecosystem, how could we describe the “natural environment” which exists before we introduce humans, interactions, and other variables?
How will the introduction of a new variable affect the environment and the people in it?
How could each human player in a given job-search ecosystem control the introduction of new or unexpected variables into the process, and limit any adverse impacts on the environment?
What new variables might be considered “invasive” (i.e., not present in the “natural environment” of the job search, and creating an imbalance that disrupts or destroys that environment)?
How should one evaluate the risks and benefits of introducing a new variable into a search process?
Did You Enjoy This Post?
Please take my reader survey and tell me what you think about Higher Ed Career Coach. It’s 11 questions and shouldn’t take long. Also, SurveyMonkey will be selecting one recipient at the end of June to receive a $25 Amazon gift card. So give your feedback and get a chance to win!
Do job interviews make you feel “dragged over hot coals?”
When preparing for an interview, it’s important to approach every question critically, and read between the lines. In “The Grill,” Higher Ed Career Coach Sean Cook and co-host John Mayo, Jr., Area Coordinator for Traditional Housing at Western New England College, will discuss the “questions behind the questions,” and help job-seekers plan their approach to common questions.
In today’s premiere episode of “the Grill” on the Higher Ed Career Coach show, Sean and John discuss the ever-popular first question: “Tell Me About Yourself.”
As we deconstruct this week’s question, we’ll talk about:
The Question (What they ask.)
What the interviewer really means or wants to know.
Ways that you can answer (that are probably wrong.)
Ways you might answer (that are better)
We’ll also take call-ins from listeners who want to take a stab at this week’s question. If you are still out there looking for your next step, call (347) 989-0055 around 11:30 a.m. Friday and we’ll listen to your answer, give you a critique, and help you refine your approach. Maybe you’ll even get heard by your next employer!
Do you like this article? If so…
Have new items from this blog delivered to your inbox, so you won’t miss anything! Plus, get special subscriber-only content, special offers and discounts. Click here to subscribe
Every once in a while, you meet someone who has a definite impact on you. It could be because they are kind and encouraging. It could be because they are damn smart. In the case of Ann Marie Klotz, it’s both.
I had a great opportunity last week to interview Ann Marie, a doctoral student from DePaul University (and Director of Residential Education at that institution) about her thoughts on a couple of great topics. The first topic, “Trusting the Job Search Process” was the subject of last week’s podcast, and it was well-received by listeners and came well-recommended by several other higher ed aficionados, including Eric Stoller.
Our conversation covered a lot of ground, and I was able to ask her about another article on her blog, annmarieklotz.wordpress.com, related to her doctoral dissertation research, which examines roadblocks that women commonly experience in climbing the ranks toward a university presidency. “Understanding Our Impact” delved into ways that higher education professionals can reflect on the ways our influence stays with students well beyond their college years, and is based on Klotz’s reading about the reflections of female university presidents on their college experiences, and the role of mentors in supporting or discouraging their achievements.
Work with Sean. I help higher ed professionals take control of their careers with tailored services including resume and CV development, LinkedIn profile optimization and networking strategy, interview coaching, and one-on-one career guidance.
Every once in a while, you meet someone who has a definite impact on you. It could be because they are kind and encouraging. It could be because they are damn smart. In the case of Ann Marie Klotz, it’s both.
