In this issue:

Articles:

• The EACE Board Packed Their Bags and Headed to Milwaukee
• Callings: The Power of Passionate Work
• Recruiting Generation NeXt
• Innovative Idea: Beyond Ideas: The Art of Entrepreneurship
• Research Recap
• Career Services with Generation NeXt
• Career Planning with Liberal Arts Majors

EACE Member Updates:

• Achievements, Accolades & Announcements
• Welcome New Members

The EACE Board Packed Their Bags and Headed to Milwaukee
By Donna Cassell Ratcliffe

It is not unusual to work with a business colleague for weeks and months on a project in a long distance relationship—sight unseen. In fact, EACE committees conduct business every day through conference calls and e-mails. It’s exciting when you finally have an opportunity to meet one another face-to-face after months of hard work hearing voices on conference calls and exchanging correspondences via e-mail.

How about working for 4 years…5 years in a long-distance relationship? This has been the case between the EACE Board and Committee Chairs with our association management firm, Technical Enterprises, Inc. (TEI) — located in Milwaukee, WI. We entered into our first contract with TEI in 2003. With a few exceptions, we have not formally met those who manage the day-to-day affairs of our association.

In the Spring, as I anticipated my year as EACE president, it seemed a worthwhile goal to schedule our first two-day board meeting in Milwaukee with the staff at our headquarters (HQ). So the members of our 2008-09 board packed their bags and flew to HQ to conduct our August 18 and 19 meeting.

Day 1: The board met at the Milwaukee Airport Wyndham Hotel in Boardroom A to tackle a jam-packed agenda. Linda Winkler, EACE Association Manager, Scott Sherer, TEI’s President, and Alex Llanas, HQ support, whom most had all met before, joined us at the table as we discussed topics such as our 2008-09 EACE goals (see http://www.eace.org/abouteace.html), fiscal matters, approval of a content management system for our new Web site, webinar technology to enhance EACE professional development activities, leadership training, recreating our concept of “networks,” our relationship with other ACE regional associations, and much, much more. After an intense business meeting, a few members of the HQ staff hosted a tailgate party (burgers and brats on the grill) at their lovely “new” Miller Park, home of the Milwaukee Brewers. The Brewers later rolled out a winning game — Brewers: 9, Houston Astros: 3. The weather was perfect and we had such a fun time with our Midwest colleagues.

Day 2: The board met at our HQ office, where we were greeted by the entire TEI staff. Finally, we had an opportunity to connect names and voices with faces. “Oh, you’re Bonnie, the one who answers the phone when our members need special assistance?” “Catherine, it's so nice to meet you. Let’s talk about the new Information Exchange Database,” “Jenny, Sharon Powers and Jennifer Beale (Bridges newsletter Co-Chairs) have spoken so highly of you,” “Don, so…it is YOUR deep voice that’s recorded on the EACE phone line greeting?” After a time of introductions (and a couple group photos), we held 10 small group meetings throughout the morning. While meeting in HQ staff offices, we were able to accomplish much while asking questions, exploring possibilities, and discussing strategies.

Left to Right, 1st Row: Donna Cassell Ratcliffe, Nathan Elton, Jill Bodino, Amy Feifer
2nd Row: Linda Winkler, Jenny Kasza, Scott Sherer, Carrie Banacin, Bonnie Kuchinski, Helen Brown, Michelle Majerus-Uelmen
3rd Row: Catherine Scholz, Paul Rossmann, Liz Kutz, Preston Sherer, Don McMurray, Alex Llanas, Nancy Williams, Ray Ruiz, Tom Tarantelli
4th Row: Rick Riesch, Ken Churchich, Christopher Roper

It was my personal goal for the board and HQ staff to, in some cases, initiate relationships and, in other cases, to further strengthen relationships to benefit the EACE association and our members. Another initiative put into place this year is that designated HQ staff members now serve as liaison members to targeted EACE committees. With HQ staff engaged in committee meetings, they can bring their expertise and information from past EACE activities. Then, all committee members will walk away with long-term and next-step plans and action items. It is our hope that this new model will improve communication, quality, and efficiencies in how we conduct business.

Was our visit to EACE headquarters a success? Absolutely YES! We are already experiencing the positive impact of this investment of time and resources as we move into this new business year.

For information about EACE’s 2007-2012 Strategic Values and Mission, please visit: http://www.eace.org/abouteace.html.

Donna Cassell Ratcliffe is the Director of Career Services at Virginia Tech and serves as the EACE President.

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Callings: The Power of Passionate Work
By Gregg Levoy

I used to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, back in my 20s, and after working there for the better part of a decade, I reached a threshold—the word in this case having a double meaning as both a point of transition and a measurement of my tolerance for pain.

At this threshold I began hearing a calling to quit my job and become a freelance writer, a decision that’s not exactly designed to reassure your parents, and one I couldn’t bring myself to make for years anyway, though the gods were drumming their fingers, and though I was slowly over-ripening and rotting on the vine.

Like most people, I won’t generally follow a calling until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, though I’m routinely appalled at how high a threshold I have for this quality of pain. But eventually the prospect of emotional and even financial turmoil, the disapproval of others, and the various conniptions of change seemed preferable to the psychological death I was experiencing by staying put—at which point I followed a bit of cowboy wisdom: when your horse dies, get off!

Still, like anyone who chooses passion over security, I was plagued by the fear that scares away sleep. And it wasn’t that I finally overcame the fear. It was that something else became more important than the fear. I still sweated through leaving behind a regular paycheck, medical benefits, a pension coming in two years, the prestige of being a big fish in a good-sized pond, and that wonderful organizational budget that can take up the slack created by almost any amount of individual goofing off: clock-watching, coming in to work late and leaving early, extra-long lunches, indiscriminate wastes of supplies, and those sick days I came back from with a tan. These are standard behaviors exhibited by people who feel about their jobs the way they felt about their senior year in high school: psychologically out-the-door, but punching in Monday through Friday just to collect the diploma.

The ancient Romans used to say that the Fates lead those who will, and those who won’t they drag. My own experience has also taught me that those who get dragged tend to put a drag on others, and if those others are the people they work with and for, you’ve got your basic lose-lose situation.

Passion and Productivity

Creating passionate, productive and callings-inspired work and workplaces begins with the individual, with the corpus (body) that defines the corporation, which simply means a collection of bodies. It involves the sometimes pick-and-shovel work of self-reflection, of aligning or re-aligning with your passion and sense of purpose, with the deep values, not the advertised values, and with a fit between who you are and what you do, which I consider among the best kinds of success. The more passionate you are, the more productive—the more you desire to produce—and the less hot, condensed breath managers and employers will need to leave on the back of your neck.

In fact, any leap you want to make in your professional or personal life that will bring you this sense of alignment and aliveness is, by definition, a calling. That calling could be to leave your job altogether or come to it in a new way, to take on a new role or let go of an old one, to make a creative leap or launch a new venture or style of leadership, or to simply make the kind of course-correction in your life or work that will make your life literally “come true.”

And what goes for the individual goes for “the company you keep.” That is, if it's challenging to walk your talk, to honor your mission and your values, to reconcile your visions with your resources, to juggle the higher calling and the bottom line, then it’s exponentially more so for the corporate body-politic of which each employee is a single cell.

But the more we as individuals address these issues and conundrums in our own lives—issues of alignment and misalignment, of self-reflection—the more we encourage the corporations and communities of which we're a part to do the same, inspiring by example. There’s a reason why some of the world’s great myths, like Sleeping Beauty and the Grail King, speak to the idea that when we sleep, those around us also sleep and the kingdom goes dormant, but when we awaken, those around us also awaken and the kingdom flowers.

Work is merely one of the arenas in which we play The Game—the one that the gods are watching from their press-box atop Mount Olympus, sipping mint juleps. It’s only one of the arenas (along with relationship, community, sports and spirituality, among others) in which we express our humanity, search for meaning, play out our destinies and our dreams, contribute our energies and gifts to the world, and spend our precious nick of time. But it’s also an arena in which we spend two-thirds of our waking lives, most of us, and it is legitimate to love our work! Life is a thousand times too short to bore ourselves.

It’s no coincidence that the American Medical Association discovered some years back that the majority of heart attacks occur around nine o’clock on Monday mornings. This undoubtedly has something to do with what most of us are doing around nine o’clock on Monday mornings, which is going back to work. Or more precisely, going back to work we don’t like, work that doesn’t match our spirits, work that can literally break your heart.

The Cost of Security

Unfortunately, most people simply tune out the callings and longings they feel rather than confront and act on them, trading authenticity for security and settling for less. In this sense, money costs too much. The price people are willing to pay to have it is way too steep. It’s terribly easy to build yourself a velvet cage: the money is great, the perks enviable (OK, so what if the only reason you’re using your medical benefits is that your job is making you sick), the surroundings are familiar, and the security comforting—but you end up becoming at best a recreational user of your passion and creativity. You lose; your company loses; the world loses.

We’re all conservatives when it comes to change. We want to conserve the status quo. We want to protect our investments, and the more investments we have, and the more success, the harder it is to let it go. So although the soul doesn’t seem to care what price we have to pay to follow our callings, we still react to change with a reflexive flinch, the way snails recoil at the touch. As an acquaintance of mine once put it, “You shall know the truth and it shall make you nap.”

Those who refuse their passions and purposes in life, who are afraid of becoming what they perhaps already are—unhappy—will not of course experience the unrest (or the joy) that usually accompanies the embrace of a calling. Having attempted nothing, they haven’t failed, and they can console themselves that if none of their dreams come true, then at least neither will their nightmares.

The rub is that the human psyche is like the Earth—it’s a closed system. There is no “out” as in “throwing the garbage out.” There’s no trash icon. Whatever energies we ignore or repress will come up somewhere else, at the very least in our dreams and fantasies. And the frustrations and regrets in our lives become like tombstones, reminding us of where someone is buried.

Remembering What We Already Know

The soul is a spiritual organ that we carry to work with us every day, and it informs and observes every move we make. There’s no ignoring its demands with impunity. It’s capable of meting out punishments as real as any that could be meted out by a boss. It’s the ultimate BS-detector, the part of us that knows what it knows, that knows where other people leave off and where we begin, that knows the feel of integrity in our lives and the feel of its absence. It’s also the part of us that sees the big picture of our lives, the blueprint against which all our actions are compared, and which is hardwired into each of us.

As the cells in a fertilized human egg multiply, very early on they reach a point when subtle indentations appear in the cell-ball, which distinguish the head from the hindquarters (a distinction that seems to be lost entirely on some people). Nonetheless, if at this point you take a cell from the head and place it down at the hindquarters, it will migrate back up. In other words, it knows what it is. It knows what it’s supposed to become. And at some level, so do we! The work is to remember something we already know, at a cellular level.

I included a fellow in my book, Callings, who described an interaction he once had with his seven-year-old daughter. She came to him one day and asked him what he did at work. He told her that he worked at the college, and his job was to teach people how to draw. He said she looked back at him, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”

A calling is an organism, a living entity, with an animus all its own. It exerts a centrifugal force on our lives, continually pushing out from within. It drives us toward authenticity and aliveness, against the tyranny of fear and inertia and occasionally reason, and it’s metered by the knocking in our hearts that signals the hour. If we are at all faithful to our calls, to the driving force of soul in our lives, it will lead us to a point of decision. Here we must decide whether to say yes or no, now or later, ready or not. And it will keep coming back until we give it an answer.

Saying yes to a call tends to place us on a path that half of ourselves thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows our lives won’t make sense without. We find ourselves following the blind spiritual instinct that tells us our lives have purpose and meaning, that this calling is part of it, and that we must act on it despite the temptations to back down and run for cover that will divide even the most grimly resolute against themselves.

The Mach 1 Experience

Saying yes—sometimes merely thinking about saying yes—also tends to throw very opposing energies into our lives. The voices of “Yes” and “No.” The voices of head and heart. And you can count on the head to say, “Have you taken a look at your savings account lately?” or “That’s not company policy.” And you can count on the heart to ask, “Where would the world be if all of its heroes followed the bottom line?”
One part of you wants to awaken, one part wants to sleep. One part wants to follow the call, the other wants to run like hell. Courage is joined at the hip with anxiety. I’ve heard it said, however, that heroism (or heroinism) can be redefined for the modern age as the ability to tolerate paradox. To hold two competing forces inside us at the same time and still retain the ability to function. To allow our souls to become boxing rings and still hang onto our marbles.

In the movie The Right Stuff, there is a scene in which the pilot Chuck Yeager is attempting to break the sound barrier for the first time, and just before he hits that illustrious Mach 1 (roughly 750 miles per hour), the plane starts shaking and shuddering and threatening to break apart. Then suddenly at Mach 1 he breaks through the sound barrier and experiences a glorious silence, and a perfectly smooth ride. There is something of a Mach 1 experience in any attempt at a breakthrough. There’s resistance, shaking and shuddering, and it’s not opposed to the breakthrough; it’s part of it. But it takes a resilient “corpus” and a resilient “corporation” to encourage and harness this chain-reaction, which begins as soon as someone follows a calling, as soon as someone says yes to passion and soul.

Without the shuddering, though, there’s no growth. A chemist named Ilya Prigogine demonstrated this in a theory that won him the Nobel Prize. He showed that “the capacity to be shaken up” is, ironically, the key to growth, and that any system—whether at the molecular level, or the chemical, physical, social, psychological or spiritual—that is protected from disturbance is also protected from change and becomes stagnant.

“I’d Rather be Sailing”

I used to do a lot of stone sculpting, and when you want to find out whether a stone is “true,” you bang on it with a hammer. If it gives off a dull tone, it means the stone has faults running through it that will crack it apart when you work on it. But if it gives off a clear ring, one that hangs in the air for a moment, it means the stone is true, has integrity, and most importantly will hold up under repeated blows.

That is the same information we want about our visions and ventures and callings. We want to know they ring true, have integrity, and most importantly will hold up under repeated blows, the kind the world specializes in, and among the best ways to determine this is simply to tap in, and listen. To take them out, or rather down from the abstract into the physical, and let them get banged on by the mortal world. Let the fear and resistance come, let people have their say, let the chaos blow through, because disturbance = growth, because moving and shaking go together, and because chaos is part of the creative process.

In the central creation story in Western cosmology—the Bible—Chaos with a capital C is described as simply the condition of the Earth before it was formed. In other words, Chaos precedes Creation. If we deny ourselves one, we'll deny ourselves the other.

Ultimately, none of us wants bumper stickers on our cars that say, “I’d rather be sailing,” or “The worst day fishing is better than the best day working.” We want to do what we’d rather be doing. We want our lives—and the work to which we’re devoting our lives—to catch fire and burn blue, not smolder. We want to feel called, not just driven. We want work to be a channel through which we express our passion and vitality, not a chin-up bar we have to pull ourselves up to every morning. And we want success to be a way we feel, not just a thing we achieve.

To do this, we must incorporate into our lives and our work the understanding that hidden deep in the clockworks of the human heart is the beneficent fear of living life, as Henry Miller once put it, without ever leaving the birdcage, and that this fear can be the beginning of great things. Outside the cage, there is life in all its toothsome grandeur, all the spill and stomp and shout of it, all the come and go of it, all of it waiting for us to act on the one hand, and on the other hand rushing down the hourglass.

Gregg Levoy, the opening Keynoter at the 2008 EACE Conference, is the author of Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life (Random House)—a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Quality Paperback Books, and One Spirit Book Club, as well as a text in various graduate programs in Management and Organizational Leadership. As a fulltime lecturer and seminar-leader in the business, educational and human-potential arenas, Gregg has keynoted and presented workshops at the Smithsonian Institution, Microsoft, BP Amoco, American Express, the National League of Cities, the Universities of California/Arizona/Nevada/Wisconsin/Texas and others, the American Counseling Association, the National Career Development Association, The International Association of Career Management Professionals, and others, and has been a frequent guest of the media, including ABC-TV, CNN, NPR and PBS.

A former adjunct professor of journalism at the University of New Mexico, and former columnist and reporter for USA Today and the Cincinnati Enquirer, he has written about the subject of callings for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Omni, Psychology Today, Reader’s Digest, and many others, as well as for corporate, promotional and television projects. His Web site is www.gregglevoy.com.

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Recruiting Generation NeXt
By Mark Taylor

The young people of Generation NeXt, products of the “Baby Boomlet” who are up to about 26 years old now, are proving to be a slippery target for recruiters seeking adequate numbers of qualified, motivated workers. Demographics make the need to successfully identify and hire talent from this age cohort especially critical as there are simply not enough workers in Generation X (26 to 42 years old) to fill the slots being left by Baby Boomers (born between 1945 and 1965) who are beginning to retire in large numbers, and taking their experience, institutional knowledge, loyalty, and mission orientation with them.

The good news is that there are lots of Generation NeXters; they are a huge generational cohort. The bad news is that their social traits, academic preparation, workplace readiness, and expectations of the workplace do not suggest an easy transition from school to work, especially for professional positions where high levels of competency and intrinsic motivation have been assumed in earlier hires. According to the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education, many who receive degrees do not have the reading, writing and thinking skills we expect of college graduates: over the last decade the literacy of graduates has declined. This data comes as no surprise to recruiters and managers. A pandemic of workplace un-readiness has been reported as graduates have difficulty thinking long term, handling details, and delaying gratification. What to do, then, to fill our positions?

Adjust Expectations:

Do not assume that Generation NeXt brings the same portfolio of readiness, skills and expectations to the application and interview process (if they come at all) that earlier workers did, especially the direct, skilled pragmatists from Generation X it has been our pleasure to hire for many years. Businesses that need lots of warm bodies will have to seriously reconsider their qualifications and requirements, casting the widest possible nets to attract the highest number of applicants to allow for maximum selectivity in hiring. The maxim “hire for talent; train for skills” might be rephrased “hire for willingness; train for competence.”

Applications:

Streamlining the application process and tweaking it for Generation NeXt’s expectations and preferences can improve the number of applicants and the proportion that continue through the process.

• On-line applications are de rigor as technological sophistication is a quality NeXters desire in an employer. Employers who can’t or don’t take an application on-line will be viewed, possibly correctly, as generally out of touch, outdated, obsolete, and not a good place to work.
• Applications might begin with a checklist of requirements; yes/no questions the applicant must answer affirmatively in order to move to the actual application. If they meet the minimum qualifications and do access the application, they might be congratulated for completing the first important step in joining your team! If the application is also interactive with questions about desired skills (“Have you worked with on-line client management systems?”), it can start the orientation process and help to make job expectations more clear. Knowing that people are not disgruntled by expectations, but can be upset by surprises suggests that we should do everything we can to help NeXters understand job and company requirements as early in the process as possible.
• Ask for everything you need, but ask for only what you need. Long, excessive, traditional applications can be viewed as time wasting and intrusive (though you might ask if they have a Facebook or MySpace page you can visit.) They would probably rather be contacted by text message than phone or even e-mail. Get hip.
• Have another Generation NeXter from within the company make contact with them very quickly after their application is initiated; not necessarily completed. This assumes that very visible NeXters are integral to the hiring process. What interested them in this job with this company? Do they have any questions about the job, or about the company? Young applicants accustomed to immediate, attentive personalized service may not fully appreciate this contact, but they will feel neglected and devalued if they don’t get it. It is also a good way to help link them to the organization through a peer, find out more of their expectations (for use during an interview), show them that this is a place where happy young people work and show the rest of the company that you “walk the talk” of fully engaging younger workers.

Interviews:

• Look at skills. If we know that a degree does not necessarily confer skills, it might behoove us to ask NeXters to demonstrate live the skills we expect them to bring and that they will need on the job.
• Nothing works like listening. While we might know what the cohort of Generation NeXt wants in the workplace, you don’t know what benefits a particular Generation NeXter wants from this job. In no particular order, what NeXters want at work include:
  • Fun/not be bored
  • Work that matters
  • Social conscience
  • Nice people who care about me
  • Praise-based supervision
  • Development of marketable skills
  • Being heard/having an impact
  • Opportunities for advancement
  • A cool place
  • Pay/compensation
  • Benefits/time off
  • Flexibility in time and dress.
• Ask, and listen for what they tell you. Tell them how the job can (or cannot) help them meet their goals, and promote the position based on what they have told you matters most to them (while making nonnegotiable duties clear).

Hiring:

• Offer fast. Many applicants from Generation NeXt are talented and motivated, while sharing the consumerism, experience with grade inflation, tech orientation, high appraisal of their own skills, sense of entitlement, confusion about workplace expectations, and assumption of success of their peers. As always, applicants will vary in ability and willingness. When “pearls” are discovered in Generation NeXt it will be especially important to engage them and make meaningful employment offers quickly. If you don’t snatch them up, someone will.
• Fast offers can be difficult when nabobs outside recruiting/HR are expected to be involved in the process and possibly ultimately decide, as these managers and directors are notorious for delay and slow response. Helping them understand “the new recruit” can be very valuable and may save them from missing out on potentially good new hires.

Dr. Mark Taylor speaks to schools and businesses and was a keynote speaker at the 2008 EACE Conference. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and Biology, a Master’s Degree in Social Work, and a Doctorate in Counseling. He can be reached at mark@taylorprograms.com.

For more information about Generation NeXt, Dr. Taylor has posted information for us at http://www.taylorprograms.com/. On the left please click on EACE. Access at this point is password protected: username: eace (lower case) password: quahog.

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Innovative Idea: Beyond Ideas: The Art of Entrepreneurship
By Jennifer W. Mullen

Beyond Ideas: The Art of Entrepreneurship is an interdisciplinary program offered by Villanova University that has been designed to increase students’ awareness of entrepreneurship as a viable career option. It was started in an effort to capture and spread the entrepreneurial energy and spirit of several faculty, staff and alumni within the Villanova University community. The attendees, presenters, and committee members are representative of each college in the University (the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, the College of Nursing, and the Villanova School of Business) and the University Career Services Office.

This annual program, now in its third year, consists of a one-day conference featuring educational sessions presented by faculty, alumni and other notable experts in the field of entrepreneurship, as well as a Web site that contains a wealth of related materials (www.villanova.edu/beyond-ideas). Concurrent sessions have been offered on a variety of topics including Business Planning, Social Entrepreneurship, and Financing Your Venture. Students learn how to take their ideas to the next level and have the opportunity to pitch their thoughts to experienced entrepreneurs who are able to assist them by providing concrete feedback and assistance. Not only is the program supported by all of the academic colleges within the University, but Beyond Ideas has also garnered support from external entities, most notably, the Delaware County Keystone Innovation Zone implemented by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (http://www.delcokiz.org/).

The success of the program has generated even more ideas from the planning committee and alumni and the Beyond Ideas planning committee will expand its offerings by following up this year’s fall conference (planned for November, 2008) with a series of shorter “special topic” programs, throughout the spring semester.

In terms of outcomes, the Beyond Ideas initiative has assisted with connecting both undergraduate and graduate students to alumni and other entrepreneurs as well as connecting alumni to other alumni for mutually beneficial purposes. It has assisted students with developing and practicing their networking skills and also with expanding their network of professional contacts. Internally, collaborative, cross-college course development and grant funding has been another positive outcome; and externally, relationships have been established and are continuing to grow with entrepreneurially related organizations/institutions, such as DelcoKIZ and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Most importantly, Beyond Ideas has served as a conduit to enable students who are on the verge of launching their ventures and taking their concepts to the next level – encouraging them to go, as the title implies, beyond their ideas.

Jennifer W. Mullen is the Assistant Director for Student Services at Villanova University’s Career Services Office. She can be reached at jennifer.mullen@villanova.edu

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Research Recap
By William Andahazy

-Quimby, J. & DeSantis, A. (2006). The influence of role models on women’s career choices. The Career Development Quarterly, 54, 297-306.

In the article “The Influence of Role Models on Women’s Career Choices,” the authors studied 368 female undergraduate students to further previous research that supported a relationship between role model influence and various career-choice outcomes. The purpose of the study was to gain new knowledge on women’s career choices and the influence of role models as they relate to John Holland’s six RIASEC (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional) occupational types.

The authors conducted six hierarchical multiple regression analyses to research the influences of self-efficacy and role models. The hierarchical approach was conducted as opposed to a multivariate approach so as to research each unique contribution of role models to the prediction of career choice after controlling for self-efficacy (p. 301, 2).

The results of this study supported that self-efficacy and role model influence together contributed to a statistically significant variance among all six RIASEC occupational types. For all six RIASEC types, the variance in career choice ranged from 16 percent for Realistic types to 39 percent for the students preferring Artistic occupation types. With regards to self-efficacy and career type, the Realistic students accounted for 14 percent (the other 2 percent came from role model influence), the Investigative accounted for 26 percent variance with no role model influence, the Artistic students scored a variance of 37 percent with the additional 2 percent from role model influence. For the Social types, 23 percent of the variance came from self-efficacy, while 4 percent was role model influence. The Enterprising students rated 26 percent and 4 percent respectively and the Conventional students rated 31 percent variance in self-efficacy with 2 percent accounted for role model influence. In other words, the role model influence was a predictor in five of the six with the Investigative career choice as the only type which did not contribute a unique variance. These results support that although the percentage is small, role models do play a part in the career choices of college-age women.

-Amir, T. & Gati, I. (2006). Facets of career decision-making difficulties. British Journal of Guidance & Counseling, 34(4), 483-503.

This article sought to study a group of young adults who were classified as having difficulty with career choice. These authors used a sample population to conduct the research, with the goals of the study being to better understand the various career decision-making difficulties faced by young adults, most of whom had interest in attending college.

Two main tools were used, the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ) and the Vocational Decision Style Indicator (VDSI). The CDDQ was used initially to measure participants’ awareness of difficulties in the career decision process. This initial CDDQ test resulted in a high correlation between the expressed and measured career interests, which supported that the test takers were aware of the difficulties of career choice. However, of the ten categories measured, there was a significant amount of variance in the size of the correlation in areas such as “general indecisiveness,” “unreliable information,” “internal conflict,” and “lack of information about the process.” When the authors compared the correlation between the CDDQ and VDSI, it was lower than expected, suggesting that vocational decision-making style is less related to career decision-making difficulties than is self-efficacy (p. 498, 1).

These findings conclude that people engaged in the career decision process may often be unaware or unable to define the difficulties they face when making career decisions. When people are unaware of these difficulties, they are most likely less inclined to seek career development assistance. The authors noted that identifying these difficulties is often an early step in the successful career development process. The results of this study suggested that when designing programs in career development and assistance, counselors should take into consideration a person’s career decision-making style and their career decision-making self-efficacy.

William Andahazy is the Corporate Relations Coordinator for the Insalaco Center for Career Development at Misericordia University. He can be reached at wandahaz@misericordia.edu.

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Career Services with Generation NeXt
By Mark Taylor

It is especially challenging to deliver career services that are effective, relevant and appreciated to our current cohort of traditionally aged students from Generation NeXt (up to about 26 years old). Their short event horizons and expectations of unlimited options might limit their recognition of any pressing need to plan, commit to plans, and act on plans. In addition, their valued opinions, beliefs in their talents, inflated ratings of competence, expectations of unlimited workplace and economic success (with ease), and sense of self-importance also make meaningful planning very difficult. Career services professionals must find ways to deliver services that facilitate realistic planning for entry-level professional work to maximize Generation NeXt students’ workplace readiness. If these same practices also facilitate academic success and persistence, career services professionals will not only be more successful with students but also more institutionally valued and esteemed. Traditional and emergent practices will need to be delivered in ways that meet students’ needs, and some new perspectives and approaches may need to be explored to combat what has been called “a pandemic of workplace unreadiness.”

NeXters have been the beneficiaries (or victims) of relentless self-esteem programming, from non-specific “you are special” messages to playing on teams where everyone gets to play and gets a trophy regardless of skill or effort, to record high school grade inflation for inversely commensurate amounts of time spent studying. It has been argued that no one has wanted to give NeXters realistic feedback on their performance or effort so as to avoid negatively impacting their fragile self-esteem; fragile because praise has not been tied to real performance, and because the helpful interventions of parents have often had the underlying message “you really couldn’t do it on your own.” Colleges have a hard time engaging, developing and changing in meaningful ways these students who see themselves as good enough already. It is no wonder that they expect academic success with little effort, expect to slide painlessly into a successful career and may actually resent the efforts of career services to harden their reality with realistic feedback on their perceived talents and performance.

Identifying individual talents and work-related aptitudes has long been the bailiwick of career counselors. Unfortunately, the young people of Generation NeXt have been receiving bad “career counseling” their whole lives. When the five-year-old NeXter asked, “What can I be when I grow up?” parents, teachers and others answered, “Whatever you want to be.” The better and more accurate answer, for the five- to twenty-five-year-old might be, “Finding your life’s work is a process. You will discover that you have certain talents that, if identified and developed through hard work, can lead you to what you are best suited to do. You will need to try hard at lots of things to see what you are capable of and best at, and to develop the range of competencies you will need. As you come to know more about yourself, what you are capable of, and what is available for you to do in the world, you can chart your course.”

So how can career services help young people better understand their interests (what they would like to do), aptitudes (what they may be better suited to do), competencies (what they can do), and developmental needs (what they need to do to improve their competencies to manifest their aptitudes and interests in a career)? Certainly, getting these words and concepts into the vernacular is helpful.

Messages about students’ needs to develop a career-specific skill set along with a range of hard and soft competencies, and to plan for a not-unlimited-but-appropriate-for-them future can be delivered and discovered through two “less traditional” channels—technology and peers. On-line services that “measure” aptitudes and interests can offer a seemingly more objective, even clinical, assessment that NeXters are more likely to accept than the expert, often realistic and limiting “opinion” of a career services professional. These programs also leverage students’ tech interests and orientation. The sophistication of many available career planning packages also facilitates academic planning and links to occupation projection data, helping students both improve planning and improve their realistic expectations for the workplace.

Young people are and always have been peer oriented, and Generation NeXt is no exception. Technology, including text messages, IM, and a plethora of youth specific content and entertainment, certainly gives them outstanding ability to connect with peers. In addition, their self-importance and self-esteem programming have convinced them that their peer group matters. Just as they value their own opinion, they might be expected to more highly value the opinion of a peer who is like them over that of an adult career services professional whose experiences may be viewed as obsolete. Mechanisms can be developed for allowing senior students or recent graduates to testify to the need to explore and plan, the need to exert effort academically, the need to prepare to enter the workplace, and the value and function of various academic and developmental outcomes promoted by the college in general and career services in particular. Whether peers share live in a class or career services event, or virtually on a blog or Web-accessible podcast, these messages can go a long way in motivating other students to plan and prepare. Understanding that NeXters are more likely to value their own opinion over the opinion of anyone else, the impact of these testimonials on the students cannot be overestimated.

Careers services might want to offer a turn-key career-readiness package to academic areas. As part of an upper level or capstone course, students should go into the field and interview someone (hopefully an entry-level worker they will see as “like them”) about the expectations and realities of the workplace. They then return to campus and share (live or virtually) with students who are earlier in their academic careers. Through this information-sharing, students farther from graduation come to have a better view of their fields early in their academic careers, and the evangelist students develop valuable insights and beliefs as they prepare to launch.

In conclusion, career services may be best suited to promote future orientation and workplace readiness through an accurate lens of the future workplace as well as the skills of the career services professional. By leveraging technology and peer influences while collaborating with faculty, career services professionals can bring about maximum benefit to students.

Dr. Mark Taylor speaks to schools and businesses and was a keynote speaker at the 2008 EACE Conference. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and Biology, a Master’s Degree in Social Work, and a Doctorate in Counseling. He can be reached at mark@taylorprograms.com.

For more information about Generation NeXt, Dr. Taylor has posted information for us at http://www.taylorprograms.com/. On the left please click on EACE. Access at this point is password protected: username: eace (lower case) password: quahog.

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Career Planning With Liberal Arts Majors
By Annette Parisi

As I began to write this article, I had lofty goals of imparting all readers with wonderful, useful, practical advice in working with students who are Liberal Arts majors. Then I remembered that I have only been a Career Counselor for less than a year, that many of you are far more experienced than I, and that each of our institutions, and our students, are different. So I humbly offer the following ideas to you in the hopes that perhaps as we reflect on our students who major in Liberal Arts, we may become more attuned to their needs.

I have noticed in career counseling sessions with some Liberal Arts students that their goals for the future are somewhat vague. Some of them are adamant about teaching either in K-12 or at a college level, so I will work with them on this goal. Others want to pursue careers such as Psychologists, which require advanced degrees. Again, these cases are pretty straightforward and I assist with graduate school planning. Many other students have told me, “I know I don’t want to be a teacher, professor, or go to graduate school. But I don’t know what I DO want to do!” These are the students with whom I find my work the most challenging, although often the most rewarding.

Below are some areas that I have found helpful in working with students who major in the Liberal Arts:

• Self-Assessment: Students have come into our office asking me what they can do with a major in Psychology, History, English, Theatre, Political Science, and others. My standard response is, “within reason, and with enough internship experience, whatever you want.” The problem typically ends up being that the student is unsure of what he or she wants. In these cases especially, I find self-assessment instruments are quite useful. Howard Figler, career expert and author of The Complete Job Search Handbook as well as several other works, has regarded self-assessments with skepticism, claiming that they are a cop-out for career counselors. (The Career Counselor’s Handbook, Figler & Bolles, 1999) I think self-assessments have the potential to be a cop-out, but if used correctly, they can be a great starting point for discussions with students. Sometimes seeing one’s traits in black and white, accompanied by some fairly robust lists of possible careers, can be somewhat of an awakening. My student and I can then discuss the assessment, whether it fits him or her, and what they think of the careers listed.
• Programming: One of my responsibilities is to coordinate the Siena College Career Center’s Lunch & Learn program—I arrange speakers on a wide variety of career-related topics to talk with students over lunch. The sessions are typically pretty small, allowing for a fair amount of discussion between students and guests. One of my pet projects within this responsibility is to find alumni who were liberal arts majors and now are quite high up in their chosen field. I am an especially big proponent of finding alumni who work in careers not directly related to their major in college. Although our programs geared towards liberal arts majors are not as well attended as some other topics (such as Careers in the FBI, which tends to be our highest draw), they do provide exposure. These programs provide good knowledge for the students who attend, and good ammunition for when students invariably tell us that the Career Center is only for students majoring in business.
• Networking/Informational Interviews: I have found that it is really useful for students to hear a message from more than one person. If I am the only person telling them that their degree will be applicable in a large number of fields, they may or may not trust that. Siena College is blessed with a rich network of alumni who are usually willing to talk with current students and offer advice. Where possible, I try to connect the student in question with an alumnus/a who had the same major and is working in one of the fields the student is considering.
• Mock Interviews: Encourage mock interviews, particularly for students going into careers not directly tied to their major. They will need to connect the dots for themselves and learn how to tie their classwork to a career, and then they will need to do the same on an interview. As a generalization, a good number of students need assistance selling themselves, and I have seen this more with Liberal Arts majors than Business majors.
• Internships: Internships are becoming more and more vital for students’ success in securing careers in their field of choice. For students with liberal arts backgrounds in particular, it also communicates to future employers that they have practical, hands-on experience in applying the critical thinking skills and communication skills acquired through their coursework. They also remain a fantastic way for students to ‘try before they buy’ with respect to a given career or field.
• Work With Employers Where Possible: Part of my role at Siena College’s Career Center is to network with employers and arrange job postings and on-campus interviews. When positions do not have a prerequisite body of knowledge, I ask the employers if they would be willing to consider Liberal Arts majors for these careers. On a good number of occasions the employers acquiesced and positions were opened to all majors. It is only fair to add that I have been told “no” a number of times, too, but it doesn’t hurt to ask!

I’m sure each of you reading this article has additional techniques and plans you use to assist students who have backgrounds in the Liberal Arts. If you have creative ideas I did not mention, please send them to me! Sometimes just being mindful of the various places from which our students come with respect to career planning can go a long way in serving them better.

Annette Parisi is the Assistant Director for Employer Relations at Siena College’s Career Center. She can be reached at (518) 783-2339 or via e-mail at aparisi@siena.edu.

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