It’s International Coaching Week! In honor of the event, The Academies is releasing a series of interviews we’ve done over the past six months with career coaches who are doing significant things in the world and experiencing success on multiple levels. Check out the first one here: The Academies/Career Coach Academy’s Success Series: Kim Avery, [...] ... Read more

Whether you are a career coach, counselor, advisor, educator, or parent, your values and beliefs can affect how you interact with females and males. And, ultimately it may affect how you guide a student, client, or your child in exploring their career options. These options include careers traditionally held by females or by males. Take the quiz below and jot down if you respond never, rarely, sometimes, or always to each question. … Read more

I am currently coaching several leaders who wish to make major changes in their careers, for example:

• A former corporate Marketing VP wants to leverage his market insight, Big Brand product management, strategy and ‘category first’ expertise into building a different type of marketing consulting practice
• A senior executive decided to research and ‘try on’ two interrelated roles and make a decision on moving efficiently into one or both roles
• A Global Business Consultant with excellent competitor analysis and developing and emerging (D&E) markets expertise needs to revise her business model by creating new options based on social media re-positioning and constructing new strategic alliances
• An executive with a sought-after professional expertise wants to move from a private consultancy to a larger firm or private company
• A senior manager who is in an economically unhealthy company wants to move to a larger role in a healthy company with future career growth opportunities

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I recently interviewed Jeff Johnson who is working in a female-dominated career as a surgical technologist. Check out the interview below:     More…  … Read more

Last Tuesday I presented at a networking event for local job seekers. There were 3 other career coach-types (technically I’m not a coach, but hey…let’s just call them coaches for this article to make things simple) talking to groups of 2 to 5 people at a time for about 15 minutes. One was doing resume reviews, the other was talking about working with recruiters, and I was teaching about personal branding. Every 15 minutes, the people at each table would migrate over to the next coach. It was kind of like speed dating, but for job seekers. During one of my conversations, I was asked this question:

There are so many career coaches and job search programs out there, how do I know which one to hire? Is it even worth it?

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I was coaching an entrepreneurial client recently and, as is so often the case, a limiting belief reared its ugly head in the middle of our coaching session. No surprise, as we all have them (limiting beliefs), including moi! Specifically, we talked about putting systems in place that would support her annual revenue goals. Listening [...] ... Read more

Have you made your resolutions for 2012? My resolution is to continue to leave a legacy of influencing leaders. How? By directly and indirectly training others to coach people to be principled leaders that create engaged staff and successful workplaces. "It's a Wonderful Life" is one of my favorite movies. It displays the positive leadership of George Bailey and the reprehensible leadership of Mr. Potter. A great quote from George in that movie is: People were human beings to him (George’s father). But to you (Mr. Potter), a warped, frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well in my book, my father died a much richer man than you'll ever be! In this movie George received the gift of observing how life would have been for others without him.  Through this experience, he learned about the impact of his leadership and kindness on others. ... Read more

I interviewed Seattle career counselor Kate Nelson about personality type and career. Ms. Nelson is an expert in using the personality assessment, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), to assist people with choosing work that is a good fit for their personality. Kate, for readers not familiar with the MBTI, please tell us what the [...] ... Read more

I am a big fan of Brendon Burchard. He’s the author of Life’s Golden Ticket and he tells the story of how he was in a car wreck and almost died. And he realized how short life is. At the time, he was still in college, but that experience changed him and matured him. Pretty inspirational, right? Well, despite having read the book and even watched some of his videos, I didn’t doanything with the knowledge and wisdom he was imparting to me. Until one day when I got an email offering me a free ticket to one of his live 4-day seminars in Santa Clara. I went. ... Read more

Check out this FUN and lively interview with Becky Washington. Becky is the head of Career Services at Portland Community College and a long time Career Enlightenment fan. We talk often and I decided to record one of our conversations so you can get an inside scoop of what us Career Advisers talk about. ... Read more