by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Feb 2, 2010 | Uncategorized
My goal for HigherEdCareerCoach.com is to create a useful resource for today’s higher education professionals, as they design their careers and pursue the balanced and fulfilling lives they deserve. I envision a site that becomes more interactive and community-based, and I need feedback from you to identify some of the needs this site can fill, and to prioritize what changes should come first.
Content Survey
Toward this end, I have created a brief (5 question) survey about possible additions to the site’s content and features. The survey should take you 5 to 10 minutes, unless you write out long comments (which you certainly may, as each question has a comment field.) The survey is being hosted at http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e2pej262g565i9vl/start Please take a few minutes to give me feedback and send along the URL to any colleagues who might have ideas and be interested.
Group Coaching for Student Affairs Placement Season
I recently put out a tweet on Twitter asking if candidates taking part in placement this season would be interested in taking part in a coaching group, and the initial response has been good. Depending on the number of participants, I may offer different groups for new and experienced professionals. If you are interested, please tweet me @hiedcareercoach or e-mail me at sean@higheredcareercoach.com
#saplacement Hashtag on Twitter!
If you use Twitter and want to keep up with questions or comments about Placement, hashtag your tweet with #saplacement and people can follow it in the public timeline. I created this hashtag and blogged about it on this site and on the Student Affairs Collaborative Blog last week and conversations are already starting to happen between candidates and experienced professionals. NASPA re-tweeted the suggestion, so hopefully it will catch on even more as we get closer to the conferences.
Speaking of Placement…
I thought that it might be interesting and useful to have a student graduating from a Master’s program blog about the Placement Experience and job searching in Student Affairs. Shannon Healy, an Assistant Living Center Director at Grand Valley State University, will be blogging periodically about her job search, impressions of the placement experience, and all the ups and downs that go along with it. Shannon has tentatively agreed to do a couple of posts a week as time allows. You can follow her on Twitter @slhealy as well. I am looking forward to her posts and hope you will follow along as she looks for an opportunity that is a good fit for her talents and interests.
Other Columns and Features in the Works
I am currently reading a few interesting books on career and college topics and will be publishing reviews and possibly some interviews on the blog, and interviewing some authors on my BlogTalkRadio Show. I am also talking with colleagues in the field about guest blogging opportunities and regular columns. Hopefully, we’ll soon have articles and perspectives on the graduate application process in student affairs, getting an assistantship, choosing a master’s program or doctoral program, and overviews of career opportunities in different specialties (Student Activities, Advising, Judicial Affairs, etc.) If you are interested in being a guest columnist or regular contributor, please contact me directly for details.
Thanks for reading!
All my best,
Sean
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jan 26, 2010 | Job Search
Are You Ready for Placement Season?
Springtime…the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and at colleges across the country, a young person’s fancy turns to thoughts of…unemployment?
In Student Affairs, this can only signal one thing…placement season is here. It’s time to brush up the resume, line up the references, check job postings, write cover letters, practice interview, really interview, and hope for the best. One part of this cycle in higher education is the placement conference, where candidates by the hundreds can answer the cattle calls of multiple employers, line up several interviews, and kick their search into a higher gear.
The three-hundred pound gorilla of placement centers these days is the Placement Exchange. A joint venture of ACUHO-I, ASCA, NACA, NASPA, NODA, AFA and HigherEdJobs.Com, this year’s exchange is being held in Chicago from March 3-7, just prior to the NASPA Annual Conference. According to the Placement Exchange’s website, 5070 interviews for 359 positions were held at last year’s conference in Seattle.
Two other larger conferences also offer placement centers: ACPA and the OshKosh Placement Exchange. ACPA hosts Career Central at their annual convention, held this year at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston from March 19-23. The OshKosh Placement Exchange is hosted by the University of Wisconsin-OshKosh and is in its 31st year.
For candidates that have a more regional focus, several regional organizations also hold placement conferences, including MACUHO’s Mid-Atlantic Placement Conference in Lancaster, PA from February 26 to 26 and the Southern Placement Exchange from March 11 to 14 in Memphis, TN. There are more, but these are the ones I could find while preparing for this article. If you know of another, please send it along, and I will make note of it in a future post.
For candidates that have never taken part in a large placement conference, the prospect of competing with several hundred people for positions can be pretty daunting. ACPA offers a great Guide to Demystifying Career Central at the Convention as a downloadable .pdf.
This guide offers steps for success before, during and after the interview, sample questions to help candidates prepare, resources and tips on handling illegal questions, negotiating an offer, planning your relocation, and more. These practical resources should be an asset to anyone in the Higher Ed/Student Affairs job market. I recommend reading it through well in advance of participation in any placement conference. It will give you a great feel for the placement experience.
Best of luck to you if you are a candidate this hiring season! In my next post, I will share some tips of my own. Though I probably can’t be as comprehensive as the ACPA Guide, I have been on both sides of the interview table at placement conferences, and can offer you some perspectives that will hopefully set you at ease and be more confident, and more prepared.
I’d also like to try a Twitter experiment to help keep the conversation going this placement season. If you are a candidate with a question about placement or an experienced professional (or employer) who has advice and perspectives to offer, please hashtag your placement questions and comments with #saplacement. Users can then follow these comments using their Twitter client and those of us with employment-related blogs and websites can post links to the trending topic or incorporate a feed to help others follow the conversations and add in their questions and advice. Let’s see if we can create a huge collaborative conversation that will help our colleagues and students succeed this placement season!
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jan 1, 2010 | Career Skills
I love to write, especially about life and career issues that people face in college, or when they work in Student Affairs.
Besides my two blogs, HigherEdCareerCoach and HigherEdLifeCoach, I am an occasional contributor to the Student Affairs Collaborative Blog, I have a Vimeo Channel, an upcoming YouTube Channel and I can share presentations on Prezi.
I feel great about the progress I have made over the last year or so in leveraging social media, and with learning to network and to market myself while still being authentic. I’m convinced I have a lot to offer today’s student affairs practitioners and candidates, and that if I just keep putting out who I am, what I believe in, and what I know, that I can help people discover their specific calling or purpose in life, rather than just doing what conventional wisdom says.
I thought that one way to give you a good overview of my passions, interests and areas of expertise might be to share some articles, presentations and videos I wrote, delivered or produced over the last year or so for other venues.
For part one, here are favorite posts I’ve written for the Student Affairs Collaborative Blog, the forum that reinvigorated my interest in writing and gave me the opportunity to join a network of professionals who are shaping conversations about the directions of the Student Affairs profession.
Visit theSABloggers.org for great posts on Student Affairs
- “15 Years in Indiana as a Cocktail Waitress”-My first post on this forum, which contained musings on career, purpose and motivation. Titled after the great song by Jack Logan.
- “Fire-ing the Canon?: Are the foundations of our profession being assaulted, or are we the barbarians at the gate?” A thought piece on the culture war that the group FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) is bringing to campuses around the country. This started a long back-and-forth with some reps and supporters of FIRE and got me some interesting and unsettling e-mails. FIRE became one of my followers on Twitter! I followed up later with “FIRE takes aim at the University of Delaware-Again” The vitriolic commentary that followed both posts reaffirmed that people were reading the blog.
- “Resumistakes! 10 Ways Your Resume, Cover Letter and Application can Sink Your Chances.” Based on real observations from both sides of the interview table, this brief article just tells it like it is, and that’s probably enough to say for now.”
- “Standing at the Crossroads, and sinking down?” explores the reality that higher education will need to accept that changes in media and communication represent a huge paradigm shift in how people interact, and not just the “latest technology.”
- “April is the Cruelest Month” provides some brief perspectives on what seems to be the longest month of interviewing at many campuses, after the equally busy months of February and March, when many of the national and regional placement conferences take place. Included links to general interview etiquette and dining etiquette advice.
- “Juggling without dropping the ball on your foot:How to evaluate, accept or decline a job offer.” Offers perspectives on how to handle the decision-making process, and avoid critical etiquette blunders so you can keep your options open, should other opportunities arise at an institution later.
- “You’re the best thing since sliced bread, and that generally meets expectations” offers some thoughts on how to approach the dreaded annual task of giving your employees feedback during performance reviews.
- “Over the Hedge” advises student affairs professionals to explore other professions and interest areas for ideas and perspectives that might change their approaches to work and life.
- “The ones that got away” explored what lessons you could glean from situations where students couldn’t stay in school, or passed away.
- In “What I learned from September 11,” I shared my personal story about how we responded at Penn State on September 11, and some perspectives I gained from that day.
- “They’re just not that into you,” gives some advice on handling rejection in your job search.
- “They wouldn’t listen to the fact that I was a genius,” offered 20 ways to blow your job interview, for those of us committed to failing in our careers.
- “Time to make the donuts!” celebrated the opening of the school year by comparing institutional efforts during arrival to the Sisyphean tasks of Dunkin’ Donuts tireless donut maker Fred the Baker.
I hope you will find these posts interesting, informative and entertaining, and that you will continue visiting HigherEdCareerCoach.com in the new year, as I work to build a site that is valued by readers for good content, delivered authentically, that provides insight and provokes conversation about pursuing careers in higher education. Thanks for visiting!
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Dec 11, 2009 | Take 5
Today’s Higher Ed professionals often feel like dinosaurs, in comparison to their students, who are connected 24-7-365 to each other and just about everyone else via various social media tools and websites. Here are five resources on the web to help you get up to speed on social media.
Social Media Can both Connect and Confuse!
