Developing Relationships at Manpower
I found my place in the world when I landed a role in staffing and human resources for Manpower Staffing on-site at Qualcomm.
The Manpower job was a great fit because I got to work with people, develop relationships, and serve an incredible customer in Qualcomm. This role allowed me to work with other Manpower customers as well including SONY, Callaway Golf, Pfizer, Northrup Grumman, NOKIA, INTEL and others. Hiring diverse talent for various clients was an incredible learning experience, and most importantly learning the characteristics of what makes a great employee, how to navigate corporate politics, and how managers and employees coexist and work together.
Qualcomm
At Qualcomm I lead hiring for contingent workforce and emerging business That work was incredible, we hired more than 20,000 contractors over seven years from around the U.S. and India to grow the talent pipeline for the company. During this time I had one of the best managers who encouraged and allowed me to flex my interests and design new programs to serve our employees and community. His belief in supporting employee growth led me to achieve my first career dream; starting a career counseling practice for the employees at Qualcomm. This practice sparked my love for supporting the career journey of people struggling to manage their careers.
The two most important takeaways from this experience were the realization that just because someone is good at a something doesn’t mean they like doing it.
The second was that helping employees discover their unique strengths, vocational interests and workplace values was a powerful approach to providing workers the self-knowledge and language to equip them to have the much needed and often avoided conversations with their managers about their career development and progression.
It was during these years that I received my certification in the MBTI, the Strong Interest Inventory, and the Gallup Strengths approaches. These tools continue to be core to my practice today and have been influential in the work.
Think-a-Bit Labs
After the success of Career Explorations, and processing the work I’d been doing hiring talent from overseas and bringing them to the U.S., I thought to myself, how could I be going to recruit talent in other parts of the world while the emerging talent, the students, in our own backyard have no idea who/what we do.This values assessment led me to pitch the idea for the Thinkabit Lab; a maker-space for middle school students to have hands-on engineering experience and learn about the world of work.
Three years after launching we had seen more than 15,000 students and 5,000 adults for a full day out of school experience where students wrote code, built their own robotic creations, and learned about their strengths, interests, and values.
From Theory ...
I was hired by the Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education, at the University of San Diego to advance future Thinkabit Labs around San Diego.
Over the next six months I worked with Dr. Ian Martin and Dr. Vitaly Popov on the theory of change and the theory of action for integrating career theory with a career development and integration model known as the World of Work Initiative.
My focus and concern was to do no harm and to answer the question about if this work could and should be done in the early grades. Should we begin to build vocational identity early? In the end, based on our work, not only with the Jacob’s researchers, USD professors, and our PhD’s in Educational psychology, we saw that we would do no harm so long as we didn’t track students. The work could and should be done. Core theories grounded the model, an extensive literature review of research that led to an NSF Grant for a side project, but in terms of core theories, there were none greater than Holland’s, Social Cognitive Career, or Work Adjustment Theories.
It was through this work that one of the greatest revelations was surfaced by Dr. Ian Martin. The truth that any career assessment is only as good as its interpretation.
... To Classroom Integration
This language and truth led me to anchor in the belief that career development then must be a human process. From this core group was designed two models:
1) The Career Development Framework
2) The Integration Framework
And these models were designed primarily for teachers, not counselors, and my focus turned to advancing the goal classroom integration of career theory, specifically to support teachers at Cajon Valley Union School District in East San Diego County.
This is where the innovation would take off. If adopted, teachers had the potential to scale the model, not counselors. The primary thinking was that teachers have 180 days to develop a relationship with a child, they are the ones that care most about developing a relationship and truly understand the individual and create a personalized learning environment, so that was the place to start. If the work was good, then counselors would ask to be brought in later. And that is exactly what happened.
The Mission of "Me"
We named this career development framework "The Mission of Me" and it revolved around three pillars: self-awareness, journey and my story.
The idea was that every child in every grade and every year should have the opportunity to learn about their unique strengths, interests, and values. They should also have the opportunity to learn about the academic and career opportunities that are available to them on their journey and along the way they should build the skills to tell their unique story that includes their self-awareness and journey learnings.
The Mission of Me was complimented by the implementation framework that included four levels of integration grounded in the belief that every child in every grade and ever year should have the opportunity to explore, simulate, meet a pro and practice the actions of workers in careers aligned to each of the RIASEC theme areas. The goal was to ensure that every child could differentiate their interests but wasn’t asked to foreclose on careers prematurely.
For that reason, regular self-reporting of RIASEC and ensuring that all students experienced careers on each of the RIASEC theme letters was experienced. It had to be an agentic process.
Cajon Valley Union School District
The work was pitched to community leaders in Cajon and soon we were consulting and training teachers on their own strengths, interests, and values. Not often a favorite for all teachers, as they saw it as another thing, there were those who sincerely saw the potential. Those early adopters pulled the work forward, but it wasn’t completely for the benefit of the kids.
These same leaders were businesspeople who’d struggled to find talent for their own businesses, especially in the trades. Not only did they want to do support students, but they also wanted to build a pipeline of talent.
This demand from local leaders and businesspeople also coincided with a time in the nation where career readiness was becoming a topic of policy. When schools and businesspeople began to start questioning the college for all belief and a time where the 1.7 Trillion in student loan debt was getting press. Research by Dr. Raj Chetty, the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce, Jobs for the Future Foundation, Working Nation, Brookings, and others were talking about zip code destiny, good jobs without degrees, opportunity youth, career pathways, job training, apprenticeships, and policy to support these needs. It was also a time where the need for career guidance continued to be talked about, but never scaled.
The gap continued.
Six months later I was offered a job by CVUSD to serve as Chief Innovation and Engagement Officer focusing on integrating the WoW model for every child, every grade, and every year.
Strengths, Interests, and Values ...
The work began by training all the teachers in strengths, interests, and values. I traveled to all 28 school sites and experienced everything from complete engagement to the absolute greatest disengagement from teachers. It was shocking to see teacher behavior. I was not deterred but very surprised. From there a full box and resources of RIASEC aligned materials was delivered to every teacher in the district. It was a big bang approach.
There was often an argument over the big bang approach versus a targeted small group approach with the coalition of the willing. Had Cajon chosen that approach the work would not have advanced as quickly as it did.
... and the World of Work
Over the next six years I would witness the most masterful integration of the WoW model, in particular, the RIASEC language by teachers starting in Kindergarten. Teachers in the early grades were able to integrate the typology into all aspects of classroom pedagogy and learning. It was truly amazing. But not only was I amazed, so where giants in the field of vocational counseling like Dr. Peter McIIveen and Dr. David Blustein who visited our schools in the early years. What did they say?
McIIveen said it was the best he’d ever seen by teachers and Blustein said it could potentially be a protective factor that the children in our schools face too often because of their life circumstances.
That was the motivation I needed to push forward through the naysayers, so we kept moving the work forward and two studies by the Jacob’s Institute helped to continue that momentum when we completed our two-year study of middle school student possible selves data and vividness using Dr. Nadya Fouad’s scales and then our Exemplary Teacher Study that included some of the most inspiring teachers I’d ever met.
During these years I had the opportunity to work with several teachers, world of work coaches, who worked with me to advance the work in the district and with other districts. As the word was getting out about the model, other districts wanted it too. But how could we scale it? That was a big question, but less of an area of focus for me than advancing the work in every grade, every school and for every child.
