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Counselors Welcome Career Asset Management |
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Career Counselors Welcome Career Asset Management CAM Addresses the Financial Barriers to Personal and Career Growth By Pauline Foster, Ph. D., The Lindisfarne Group From the perspective of the career coach, we have found that our clients hesitate in making the type of career changes they would love to make because of insecurity about personal finance. Sometimes because of lack of knowledge about what is possible. So we’ve welcomed this opportunity to team with financial planners to develop, through the case study, a model that we can use and that can be replicated elsewhere. This article outlines our role as career coaches, what our goals are and the process we use. Our Primary Objective – Greater Self Knowledge As career coaches we strongly believe that greater self knowledge leads to wiser life choices and we see our unique role as helping individuals gain that self knowledge and coaching them to use that self knowledge in making sound career decisions.
Our Secondary Objective – A Guide to Managing Transitions Careers, like life in general, are characterized by transitions. Some transitions are challenging, some are welcome, and others are feared. Even when the transition has been a well-considered choice it can still be a fearful prospect. Again as career coaches we see our job as pushing a little to get individuals off the starting block, stimulating them to think outside of the box, challenging them to discover their undeveloped potential and helping them chart a new course. Our Process and Tools We begin our process by having clients complete a number of assessment instruments, some of them are paper based and others require the individual to log on to a website. The instruments are designed to identify individual skills, competencies and interests, their values and motivators, their strengths and challenges, their personality style, how they use emotional intelligence and even leadership skills. We select from a whole range of instruments but those we use primarily are:
Once the instruments are completed and scored we meet with the individual and work through a collaborative process with the individual, discussing and interpreting the results of each instrument. We give full weight to the individual’s life circumstances (including their financial circumstances) and their career and life history, emphasizing relevant findings, while offering encouragement to step outside of the box and to dream. We guide the process but without constraining the process or the individuals thoughts and inspirations. So it is a relatively lengthy process time wise, it is about balancing dreams with reality it is about integrating information from a whole range of sources. Each coaching session and each path of self discovery is as unique and different as the individuals we coach. This is a time for reflection and we don’t and can’t predict the direction or outcome of this process. Generally speaking all this takes place over three or four two hour meetings, spaced a week apart. This timing is deliberate to allow processing of thoughts or completion of assignments by the client between sessions. At the final meeting we brainstorm the findings and define a specific track or several tracks that may run concurrently or consecutively. And finally we create an outline plan for following the track and reaching the desired goal. If, as a financial planner, you’re considering partnering with career coaches to implement this model, you should definitely ask to be taken through the process yourself, so that you can understand the values and thoroughness of these instruments. Confidentiality Confidentiality is key to this whole process. It is an intense process and emotionally laden. The process demands a high degree of honesty on the part of the individual, including elements of their lives that they may have long regarded as dysfunctional. We need the individual to feel comfortable in sharing such information. The Partners of The Lindisfarne Group are members of the American Counseling Association and abide by the Associations Code of Ethics (1995), Section B – Confidentiality. A signed contract outlines the relevant section of the code. This has implications for sharing of information between the professionals in the process, and how to structure access to the career planning meetings for the financial planner. We’ll discuss this further in our breakout session. The Career Policy Statement Worksheet Incorporating the Financial Situation We devised a worksheet that helps incorporate our career planning process into the Career Asset Management Model. Although this worksheet is made available to the individual at the beginning of the process it not completed until the final few sessions when a direction begins to emerge. It is modeled on worksheets used by the CAM financial planners, for example we begin with a personal vision statement and a career visions statement which we merge into an integrated mission statement. The worksheet outlines strategies for achieving the career goal as well as the constraints. It lists any education/training skills sets that will be utilized in reaching the goal or that need to be supplemented. The worksheet also lists the financial resources available and needed to achieve the goal. This is the point where the individual’s financial circumstances are itemized and articulated clearly as part of the career planning process. The last sections of the worksheet provide an action plan and timelines and an integrated life realities checklist where we use Cali Williams Yost’s Work+Life Fit concepts to ask whether the new targeted position has the potential of meeting the work+life fit that the individual requires. If not, then we strategize how that is to be achieved and implement the plan as part of our process. We look forward to partnering with financial planners and using CAM to help our clients. |
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