Leverage your unique strengths to be successful in your next career move.
A successful career pathway calls for an understanding of your strengths and how to leverage them in the best way.
This two-day workshop will help you explore and harness the skills and strengths you already have as well as chart your own path forward. Through a systematic, reflective, and outcome-focused process, you will:
- Identify key areas of professional focus for future career growth
- Identify core values and explore the connection between those values and your career
- Complete the StrengthsFinder assessment to determine how your unique strengths can manifest in your career path
- Identify opportunities for achieving career milestones and set timelines for leveraging them
- Walk away with a personalized action plan and toolkit for making changes to elevate your career
Personalized Clifton Strengths Assessment
One of the highlights of the program is the opportunity to complete the Clifton Strengths Assessment. This tool will provide a foundation for exploring potential career paths, helping you to identify your strengths and leadership style.
Who Will Benefit
For provosts, deans, department chairs and faculty who have identified a bench of future leaders: how do you ensure the success of your faculty as they think about transitioning to different roles? This program will provide these select faculty key considerations and practical thought exercises to help them shape the decision right for them.
Only the first 40 registrants will be allowed to participate. If you have questions about whether this program is right for you, please contact Ashley Brand - ashley.brand@academicimpressions.com
Agenda
Your registration for this event includes access to the sessions below and materials, breakfast, lunch, and access to the networking reception on Wednesday, breakfast and lunch on Thursday, as well as refreshments and snacks throughout the conference.
Day 1: Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Framing, Reflection, and Analysis
In this introductory session, your facilitators will share the program’s outcomes and underlying principles. You will hear stories of their career trajectories and discuss your own trajectories up to this point.
During this session, your facilitator will lead you through a career pathway analysis. Armed with a toolkit – which can be applied in other contexts – you will clarify key strengths and weak points you’ve encountered to guide you through your career visioning process.
Core values are clues to our talents and are important in making future career decisions. During this exercise, you will receive a deck of CliftonStrengths cards and will use these to identify and understand your own core values.
Deep understanding of your own strengths, preferences, and challenges is critical to your success. You’ll learn the core principles and research behind the Clifton Strengths Assessment you completed to help you harness its power and set specific career goals that fit with who you are personally and professionally. The Clifton Strengths assessment will also provide insight to your style of leadership and the opportunities to achieve excellence in your role.
In this working session, you will use your reflections, your values, and your identified strengths and challenges to create a powerful vision for your academic career. The future career vision you will develop will be based on your past experiences, who you are as a person and professional, who you want to be professionally, and what feeds you in your work environment. It will serve as the core of your career action plan.
Day 2: Thursday, November 15, 2018
Your Career Action Plan
We’ll use this time at the beginning of Day 2 to table-set for today’s sessions, goals, and outcomes.
Real life has a way of derailing even the best-laid plans. Before developing your career action plan, your facilitator will lead you in a discussion of ways to anticipate, assess, and overcome potential obstacles that can prevent you from pursuing the goals you set. Through this discussion, you will brainstorm potential solutions to obstacles in order to gain grit and resilience and to meet your career trajectory goals.
During this session, the facilitator will lead you through the process of creating a specific career action plan that builds on your mission statement, your Clifton Strengths Assessment profile, and your career goals. By the end of this session, you will have a complete draft of your own academic career action plan that includes specific goals, pathways to reach them, and strategies for ensuring your success.
This time is reserved for working work with your colleagues and the facilitator to fine-tune your plan, look for possible conflicts and problems, and revise as needed. Each facilitator will be available during this session to provide any feedback or answer questions you may have regarding your own unique circumstances.
Now that you have developed your career action plan, how will you hold yourself accountable? What does your career trajectory look like within your institution? What would it look like to transition out of your current position or institution? During this final session, you will create a personal accountability plan as well as apply all the information you’ve learned to your current and future roles.
Speakers

Mary Coussons-Read
Department Chair
University of Colorado Colorado Springs
Having served as department chair, associate dean, associate vice chancellor for research, and provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, Mary’s expertise draws from extensive and rich experience in higher education leadership and administration. Her record, research, and service have a special emphasis on supporting female and underrepresented faculty in academia.

Therese Lask
Training & Organizational Development Specialist
Colorado State University
Therese has helped organizations infuse a strengths-based philosophy to assist with building teams and helping individuals contribute their best at work. Her areas of expertise include: strengths development, strategic planning, wellbeing, hope, multi-generational workforce, change, professional resilience, and career exploration.
Questions About the Event?
Ashley Brand
Program Manager, Academic Impressions