Leadership and Career Progression

Session Chair:

• Stacie Santhany, The Dow Chemical Company

Session Description:

Skills such as communication, people skills, leadership, and getting along with co-workers are vital in today’s world.  You can get through many days with hard technical skills only, but it takes a combination of soft and hard skills to do well throughout a career.  It is important to know what it takes with respect to soft skills to help develop your employee development plan.  Whether you are interested in highly technical careers, leadership positions, or sales/marketing, these skills help build and maintain relationships in every career path. This session will feature discussion on Leadership Development, Career Growth and Progression, and other related topics.

Schedule:

Abstracts:

Early Career Leadership Development

Among new engineering graduates, there is a tendency to delay thinking about or pursuing leadership skills in the business world outside of academia.  This, coupled with the high demands enforced by a rigorous academic curriculum as an undergraduate or graduate student results typically in missed opportunities to identify and grow essential leadership competencies for entrance into formal management roles.  Consequently, many engineers with the interest in pursuing a managerial career path find themselves behind contemporaries from non-engineering disciplines.  The National Academy of Engineering has recognized for some time the need for more engineers to pursue leadership roles not only within the technical arena, but also in the political domain where there is great need for engineering contributions to the development of public policy. 

This forum will highlight practices that recent graduates can use to hone their leadership skills early in their careers.  Topics include self-assessment, evaluation of motivation to lead, ways of identifying leadership competency gaps, and techniques for gaining the requisite practice of leadership tools both within and outside the workplace.  Early preparation for leadership roles is essential for managerial candidates so that when the opportunities arise, the candidate has already fully demonstrated the ability to lead effectively.  Strategies for moving from dependent through independent towards interdependent behaviors that are the hallmark of effective leaders will be presented.  Key to any strategy is the development of a personalized leadership development plan based on SMART goals and crafted to gain the boss’s support.   Effective planning for leadership roles relies on adequate preparation before the first day on the job.  Some of the keys to early success will be discussed.

5 Steps to Your Next Ideal Job

Are you ready for a change in your work? Do you feel stuck, out-of-place or unchallenged? In this seminar, I will describe a five-step process for landing your next ideal job that I've never seen fail. I call it your “next ideal job” because no job is ideal indefinitely. As you develop, you will eventually outgrow any job and will want new challenges.

I discovered and refined this process while coaching more than 200 people the past 10 years. Clients that followed this process landed a job that matched their skills, abilities and goals for that stage of their development. One client, who was particularly diligent, received five job offers in two months. This process works not only for landing a better job, it works for achieving any goal. One client told me she found her spouse using this process.

10 Key Points to Success in Your Career

What is success and how does one reach it? Do you need a plan to achieve success in your career?

Success is defined differently by each person. There is not one perfect path to success that fits everyone. Achieving success is a part of who we are as individuals. There are various skill sets that enable a person’s success. Some of these skills are learned behaviors. This session will focus on non-technical concepts and tips to aid young professionals in the industry toward success in their careers. The points delivered in this presentation are based on concepts learned and developed through experience working in an operational environment of diverse individuals.

A successful career is a book where you are the author. Sometimes the book takes you in a direction that you wouldn’t have expected or planned, the same can happen in your career. How should you adapt and anticipate those changes? As the pages turn, your character may be challenged. How self-aware are you? The main character of a book always has supporting characters. Are you surrounding yourself with good people? Like a good book, a successful career is filled with adventures, failures, learning from those failures and balance of hard work and fun that deliver a positive impact with a good ending.

This presentation is geared towards young professionals looking for non-technical techniques to utilize along with their technical abilities to reach their goals that define their success. It will provide suggestions on how to add value to industry and society as you progress in your career.