Career Workshops

There were four of them all three hours long. I attended them in two days so it was a lot to take in.

The first one was a career assessment workshop. I got a chance to get my Birkman report. I’ve done these assessment things before and the usefulness of each vary. This one was quite accurate. It described my interests, my behaviour, my needs, and my stress behaviour. They were things I knew vaguely, but once they are in front of me things became quite clear. This is great. For example, now that I am aware of my behaviour under stress I can be more vigilant and make sure it doesn’t have negative affects on my effectiveness. They also suggested career areas of best fit. It was not a surprised that my current field didn’t make it to the top five. However, it was a nice surprise when the top match was something I had considered as part of my future career development.

The second one was resume workshop, which is pretty self explanatory. The workshop leader pointed out some misconceptions. Also, there were little things, which I got clarification on.

The third one was self marketing and networking. I’m a little embarrassed to say I over slept and missed this one. However, since all of these are supported by extensive web resources I will look into it.

The fourth workshop was interviewing and negotiating. This was pretty cool. We went through common interview questions and what the employer hopes to learn from each of these. The web resources have even more questions available to help prepare for an interview. The idea is to fully prepare your answers (not memorized) but to think of how you will answer it and back it up with examples.

The negotiation part especially rang true for me. As he is talking I find myself thinking ‘Yeah! That’s what I thought.” or “Oh no. I wished I knew that.” Since it has much to do with PF and my experience, I will put it in a post by itself.