I. CAREER MANAGEMENT

Overview and Goals:
These multimedia and highly interactive seminars and use of a skills assessment will help empower participants to take responsibility, become self-reliant, and realize personal talents and skills enabling self-career management. Outcomes for participants include:

Gaining a better understanding of their own career goals in relation to the agency goals
Development of a new career plan or IDP
Charting a new learning course
Understand and develop the ability to articulate one's leadership preferences and human interaction needs
A marketable Bio
Increased interviewing skills from the applicant side
Increased Disability Acumen and Communication Skills

1.1 Career Advisor Certificate Program (Customized to the Federal or Corporate Sector):

Objective: To provide professional HR, Organization Development, and Training personnel with a formal Career Advisor Certification.

Synopsis: In this propriety program offered by Pressman Consulting, the participant will receive Certification in career advising procedures by Dr. Sue Pressman, PhD. The certification allows the successful participant to further their professional growth as service providers in Human Resource Development. Participants will be introduced to basic counseling and coaching skills, the critical elements necessary for helping employees meet their goals and raising the bar for individual and organization performance.

This program can be customized for public or private organizations. It is designed for 10-30 people and includes presentations, interactive exercises, videos, and follow-up individual coaching.

1.2 Managing Your "Own" Career and Individual Development Planning

Why should you be concerned about planning your career? Because it is YOUR career! If you don't take responsibility for your career, who will? And, just think about all the time you spend at work. Why not ensure that you get the maximum satisfaction out of work. Additionally, GSA benefits from having a competent and motivated workforce, capable of adjusting to new challenges and change. The Federal workplace, like the private sector has been affected by a number of significant changes, which have definite ramifications for your career planning.

This workshop will help participants understand the career development process in the Federal government and give them valuable career/life planning tools.

Learning Objectives:

Review the career development process and understand its relationship to GSA's mission and goals
By taking the SkillScan Professional Skills assessment participants will obtain immediate results for developing their own profile of competencies and areas for professional development.
A better understanding of one's own career goals in relation to the agency goals
Identify individual competencies and skill sets
Identify areas for future development to enhance opportunities for career advancement
Identify key skill sets for developing new career plans, writing resumes, and having key skill sets at the forefront when preparing to interview.
Learn the competencies required for top leadership in today's Federal Government that were prerequisites to those senior level positions and have an opportunity to work in teams on actual executive core competency scenarios specific to the agency
Learn how to draft and utilize Individual Development Plans

1.3 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Step I or II

The career development and management process begins with self-assessment. This includes understanding one's work style preferences based on personality characteristics. Participants will take either a paper and pencil or online (requires Internet Access) MBTI Step I or II assessment and will receive via instructor interpretation an interpretive report.

Workshop will include a highly interactive multimedia presentation with exercises customized to the organization.

Learning Objectives:

Through professional interpretation of results understand individual personality preferences
Learn how one's preferences can affect and influence working together in organizations (the workplace)
Learn how to use the knowledge of preference and type in decision-making, team building, and conflict resolution, relationship building, and customer service.

Pre-work Alternative: Take MBTI online prior to the workshop. This is password protected and only instructor will receive results, which will be distributed at the training. In keeping with ethical guidelines, no results will be given out prior to the workshop or without professional interpretation.

1.4 Resumes: Tips, Tools, & Techniques for Creating a Powerful Marketing Document

In today's competitive job market your resume must reflect the skills (solutions) you are selling. Your resume may well be the most important part of your job search. Without a resume or online application, often containing the same information in another format, there wills no interviews, no negotiations, no job offers. Yes, your past experience and work history are important elements to include in your resume. However, it is critical to remember that your resume should be designed to take you where you want to be, not necessarily where you've already been. This requires a thoughtful marketing plan, well-developed market research skills, and strong communications skills.

This workshop will review the latest job winning resume techniques and provide samples and opportunities to write and share your resume summary statement. The STAR approach to writing accomplishment statements will be reviewed.

1.5 Interview Savvy:

The Ins And Outs of Behavioral and Performance Based Interviewing

This workshop is for anyone who will be interviewing themselves or interviewing others. To help you prepare for interviews this workshop will teach you:

How to plan or plan for a structured interview that includes pre-planned interview questions.
How to recognize the importance of developing an interview plan based on thorough knowledge of the job.
How to understand that a behavioral example is a specific life-history event that can be used to determine the presence or absence of a skill.
How to use interviewing techniques that allow for interviewer control.
How to explain why it is important to make selection decisions based on facts and information, not on a gut feeling.
How to explain why the concept of "the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior" is so important in the behavioral-based interview process.
How to recognize why some questions cannot be legally asked in the interview process

1.6 Understanding and Preventing Burnout

The training covers the theories, stages, symptoms, and causes of burnout, managing yourself, personal power, managing personal and office stress, tools and techniques for effective time management and organizational skills, building and utilizing support systems, burnout prevention skills, boundaries, and revitalization strategies.

Learning Objectives:

Learn what burnout is and how to prevent it
Understand how to manage yourself and your employees
Develop a plan for balancing work and life
Discuss how to maintain enthusiasm and motivation.

The methodology includes lecture, questionnaires, and small group activities/ discussion and is presented using PowerPoint and a participant workbook. The course will be taught by a licensed professional counselor with a strong background in organizational training.

1.7 Is it Retirement or Sailing into the Sunrise?

Traditionally we visualized our retirement years as time to relax and do leisure activities that we were unable to enjoy while we were working. In general, retirement meant sitting on our porches and enjoying the view, sitting in our golf cart playing the great game, sitting in our boat fishing for that big one, or taking time to visit the grandchildren. These are all wonderful visions but to make those visions become a reality there is so much more to planning your retirement for the lifestyle that we baby boomers expect and deserve.

Fortunately most of us have participated in Federal retirement plans and have learned the benefits of planning. However, financial security is only one of 15 factors that influence the way we will spend our golden years. Today, there is a new way to look at retirement. We will learn 14 other factors that you will find useful in your preparation.

Don't get blindsided, take this unique opportunity to examine these personal retirement factors that many of us take for granted and can stop our retirement in its tracks or at the very least confuse us and make us feel like our freedom and everything we thought we planned for is sailing into the sunrise.

Each participant will receive a copy of the book: The New Retirement: Discovering Your Dream, learn the 15 factors influencing successful retirement planning, and take a brief retirement inventory. Discussion and exercises around the key factors will jump-start your new plan. Come join a certified retirement coach and learn how to prepare for the ultimate retirement life.

1.8 Managing Stress - Achieving Work/Life Balance

As part of our innovative program on Managing Stress - Achieving Work/Life Balance we offer the following topics as part of our learning objectives:

Workplace Balance – What is it?
Family Balance – Is there such a thing?
Developing a Personal Work-Life Plan – Shifting from Reacting to Creating.
The Number One Block to Happiness – How to Increase your Happiness.
Why Anger is Detrimental to Your Good Health – How to Release It
The Role Courage Plays in Expanding Your Happiness – Recognize it in you.
The Empowered Life – A Definition

This seminar will allow participants to understand stress and its affects on their personal and professional lives. They will take away the following skills:

Discover their own personal stressors
How to Minimize or eliminate common daily stress issues
Identify areas for improving coping skills
Identify ways to gain greater life satisfaction and
Enhance personal and professional performance

Our final leg in providing organizations with an innovative customer centric seminar is Pressman's ability to offer post-seminar customer support. At the organization's option, we can provide one of the nations leading career counseling/coaching experts to meet with employees confidentially as part of our innovative customization program.