Career Planning: A Pathway to Employment

Welcome! You are beginning a very important journey on your path to a meaningful and successful career. This course is designed to help you launch a new career or jump start an existing career. This course, and your team of instructors, will guide you from making that first impression, to networking your way to an interview, through the stages of interview preparation, mastering the interview, and following up with the perfect Thank You note. We will work with you on generating a social media strategy and guide you through evaluating job offers when they are received. We will ask you to work with us as you move through the course, job searching and preparing as you go. We'll ask you to share your experiences and your success stories, as we offer you our best guidance in launching your career. Let's begin with making a first impression! By the end of this module, you will be able to: (1) Identify ways to make a great first impression, (2) Distinguish between best and worst practice when first meeting a new professional contact, (3) Differentiate between promoting yourself and promoting what you believe in, (4) Practice tasteful self-promotion, & (5) Create self promotional opportunities through an Elevator Pitch

By the end of this module, you will understand the best practices for conducting a social media audit, and developing a social media strategy, that is designed to help you, not hurt you, during every phase of your career. You will better understand why and how employers use social media before making hiring decisions, and what employers are looking for when they review your social media presence. The reading titled "Practical LinkedIn 4.0" written by Randy Hain, CEO of Serviam Partners, will help you understand the best practices for developing your LinkedIn profile, and how to use LinkedIn to develop professional business relationships. You will also learn about methods for using social media to become a thought leader in your industry or specialty area.

Welcome to the 5th module of this course! In Mastering the Interview, our teaching team has accumulated some fantastic resources for you. We've reached out to colleagues, dusted off the books from our shelves, and argued over which were the best of the best resources we could share. We think we found many of them and hope they are helpful to you, as you begin to think about the interview process!