Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

3 Tips for Getting Over Your Vacation Hangover
You’re back from vacation and hopefully you unplugged while there. And now you have a vacation hangover. You’ve got way too many things to do for work, not enough time to do them in and your wondering, just like you’ve wondered the morning after you had one too many drinks, was it worth it? Should I really have even gone on vacation?

After returning from a work and play trip, the hangover hit me (and my husband) hard. The around the world re-routing and delays of flights to get us home didn’t help nor did the thee hours of sleep we got the night we returned due to the around the world trip home. My husband walked in from his first day back at work, looked at me without a hey, hi, how are you, and simple stated, “I don’t think our vacation was worth it.” After which, he took the time to look at me, still in my pajamas, covered in spit up, no shower in 48 hours, laundry piles all over our closet and again simply said, “Looks like your day went about like mine too.” Whereas he had been at work, I was trying to catch up on work and laundry and spend time with our two kids on our first day back. Not good. We actually both needed a drink, or so we thought, to nurse our vacation hangover.

If you took some of our unplugging tips to heart by getting stuff done before you left and scheduling a day or two to play catch-up when you returned (unlike us), you may not be hung over at all.

But if you are, here are some tips to get over it:
1. Realize you have to take recovery from your hangover one day at a time. You can’t get everything done in one day, so don’t stress yourself out when you don’t. Prioritize what is going to help you get over your hangover the quickest and tackle that first. Ignore your inbox if you have to. Those 987 emails can wait. For me, tackling playing grocery store and painting with my three year old was more important than the email inbox. It was a beast though when I got to it.
2. Sleep. If you don’t catch up on it, you are never going to get anything done. Sleep some of it off to be more productive.
3. Drink water. Lots of it. Especially if you’ve been on a plane. Even if you haven’t been on a plane, water can help cure any type and any size hangover. Well maybe not a vacation hangover as much as a drinking water, but it does beg the point of making sure you take care of yourself physically because if you don’t you’ll never get your productivity back.
How have you nursed a vacation hangover and gotten through it?
July 1, 2014
3 Highlights from the 2014 NCDA Conference

The 2014 National Career Development Association Conference in Long Beach, CA was a tremendous experience. Here’s what I learned along with some thoughts on leadership actions for us all to consider:

1. Career Development in an Employee Engagement Strategy. I heard about how Boeing and GM are setting up systems (mainly through online tools) to facilitate employees to take ownership of their careers and for leaders to take ownership of facilitating career development discussions and planning with their employees as a part of performance management.

I personally learned how true this lesson is through an experience a friend had before we departed. The organization he works for has a new CEO. He had a one-on-one meeting with him, and the first question the CEO asked him was, “What are your career goals?” He then engaged in a discussion with my friend about how he could help him facilitate the growth of his career. This is the first time my friend has experienced this and his engagement with his organization is now renewed. He called it “refreshing.”

ACTION ITEM FOR LEADERS: Ask your employees, “What are your career goals and how can I help you reach them?”

2. Planned Happenstance Happens. As a career development theory I’ll have to admit I wasn’t immediately drawn to, I saw it in action when a lady attended one of my sessions with a desire to put a plan in place to facilitate business and industry connections with schools. The session I was speaking about wasn’t on this topic, but the roundtable I presented earlier in the conference was. I was able to provide her with the handouts and resources for this hopefully enabling some food for thought for her on how to do this in her community. She shared with me how her community set up a program where teachers were immersed in business and industry that I was able to learn from.

ACTION ITEM FOR LEADERS: Put yourself in a position to interact regularly with others you wouldn’t routinely get the chance to interact with. You can be a resource to them and they can be a resource to you. We all have something to learn from those around us.

3. “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” -Richard Buckminster Fuller@BryanLubic did a fanatic job in a roundtable illustrating how you can use tools to create experiences that lead to career decisions and actions instead of telling people what career path they need to take. Teach people how to fish, don’t give them a fish.

ACTION ITEM FOR LEADERS: Show and do, don’t tell. No one likes a dictator or a know-it-all.

Agree? You may like this post.

What take aways did you have from your last conference or professional development experience? How did you act on them?

June 24, 2014
The only question you need to ask when choosing a college

The decision making process for choosing a college, should look like this:

career a major a college

Not the other way around. Most people look at the other way around.

With this being said, college is a means to the end of pursuing a meaningful and lucrative career.

And with that being said, the only thing you should ask when choosing a college (after you’ve made sure you’ve thoroughly asked yourself and determined what career direction you want to take) should be:

What are the college’s placement rates or graduate outcomes from the program/major you are planning to pursue?

This should be your key decision criterion.

Wait you say, college is about more than just me getting a job! It’s about the experience. You’re right, and it is about finding the right college where you can thrive, work hard and be one of those people who does get placed in a meaningful career because of what the college can help you achieve and through your own efforts.

If you want to search for a college by all those “fit” factors as well as cost, we love College Board’s College Search tool. It lets you filter colleges by ten factors and save them for further consideration.

As some food for thought, you also might want to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s advice on the worth of degrees. When comparing Ivy League to other schools that have a basic quality of academic standards, there is no difference in terms of job opportunities and the salaries associated with them that graduates receive.

June 23, 2014
The What and Why of Competencies as Seen through CDF Training and SHRM’s new move
The HR world has been all a buzz with SHRM’s announcement of a switch to a competency-based certification.

In an email to members, the SHRM CEO stated, “We believe a competency-based certification is the new standard for HR professionals around the globe. Our members have told us this; and we have listened.”

Regardless of whether or not you agree or disagree with SHRM’s move, competency models are prevalent. The career development world has been competency-based through its Career Development Facilitator Training for quite some time.

What is a competency?

Good ole Wikipedia provides us with this definition: “A competency is a set of defined behaviors that provide a structured guide enabling the identification, evaluation and development of the behaviors in individual employees.”

Why I like competencies

Competencies are behavioral-based. Whereas an assessment of knowledge is just that, knowledge that may or may not be acted upon or put in to practice, a competency begets action through behaviors.

If you have knowledge of something, you can tell me about it, but if you are competent in something, you can show me how to do it by demonstrating it. You apply your knowledge and demonstrate it through your behaviors. This aids others in learning through your behaviors.

What are the CDF Competencies?

CDF competencies emphasize the broad scope in which career development professionals practice. They are:
1. Helping Skills
2. Labor Market Information and Resources
3. Assessment
4. Diverse Populations
5. Ethical and Legal Issues
6. Career Development Models
7. Employability Skills
8. Training Clients and Peers
9. Program Management/Implementation
10. Promotion and Public Relations
11. Technology
12. Consultation
To read more about the competencies click here.

If you are tied to the career development world in any way, are these things that you think you need to be able to DO not just know as they relate to delivering services to whoever your “client” may be? If so, CDF training may be an option for you, as it provides a path that can lead to your Global Career Development Facilitator (GCDF) certification.

Among other reasons, the emphasis on GLOBAL may be why SHRM is driving towards a competency-based model. The National Career Development Association (NCDA) already sees competency-based training, education and certification as the best method for preparing practitioners to operate in a global environment. It also emphasizes the need for the same standards of practice for a profession around the world.

More to come in our next post about the CDF competencies as we sample what a couple of them look through the doing of them, not just the knowing of them.

What do you think? Is knowing something the same thing as being competent in it? Is it all really just six of one and half a dozen of the other?
June 17, 2014
Career Development Facilitator Competencies in Action- Tell, Show and DO

One of the reasons I love CDF training is because the competencies that the training emphasizes fit together so nicely. Not only that, but they also spur action through behaviors as any good competency model should do.

An example of 2 CDF competencies in action

Take these two competencies:

“Helping Skills – Be proficient in the basic career facilitating process while including productive interpersonal relationships.”

And

“Program Management/Implementation – Understand career development programs and their implementation, and work as a liaison in collaborative relationships.”

In the CDF training, you learn that helping skills includes being competent in helping others set goals and create action plans for themselves as it relates to their career. You act on this knowledge, by creating tools to help clients to set goals.

But the application of being competent in goal setting is taken to the next level through the competency of program management implementation. What good program manager doesn’t need to know how to set goals, track them, and meet them?

Participants in our CDF training take what they have learned about goal setting in the helping skills content and demonstrate that they can direct their behavior to apply goal setting by mapping out a new program or a redesign of an existing one complete with goals, timelines, deliverables and metrics.

Tell à Show à Do

We like to call our model for building the CDF competencies Tell à Show à Do, with an emphasis on the DOING. We focus on building the 12 competencies by designing assignments and deliverables in the course that help you kill two birds with one stone. They build your knowledge, but the assignments also produce tangible tools and plans that you can use on the job. Then you can easily show that you know how to apply knowledge by doing.

Your boss can’t see the knowledge in your head without you acting on it, so the doing helps advance your career just as much if not more than having the certification.

If are a career development professional and want to have some fun doing, you can register for our CDF course.

If you’re a part of school system, college career center, local or state workforce agency or career center, you may want to learn more about how this model of applying the CDF competencies can help your group create a strategic plan through the professional development opportunity. To do so, you can view our presentation on CDF Training and Strategic Planning (which will be presented this Saturday, June 21, from 8:30-9:30 am at NCDA’s Conference in Long Beach- join us if you are here!) There is also a case study you can read to see how this has been put into practice with a K-12 School System

How has doing helped advance your career more than knowing?

June 17, 2014