OU’s Career and Leadership Development Center offers new class, Leadership Coaching, to undergraduates seeking career advice
Ohio University’s Career and Leadership Development Center has begun offering leadership coaching sessions to help students get a job after graduation.
The CLDC was established two years ago to help students with writing resumes and cover letters and provide them with general employment advice.
The office, located in Baker 533, started a new program, dubbed Leadership Coaching, spring semester to help OU students identify and expand their career skills.
“We know that career is a developmental process,” said Erika Peyton, assistant director for employer relations and marketing at the CLDC. “We know that it changes a lot, particularly with current and future generations. There’s a lot of evolution in the career process.”
The coaching consists of three 30-minute sessions. The first involves the student familiarizing him or herself with a CLDC representative who will serve as the student’s adviser throughout the remainder of the program.
The adviser notes a participant’s values, interests and strengths, and the student prioritizes two of these skills to strengthen during the next two sessions.
Those goals are “very individualistic” to each of the students and “specific to them and their needs,” Peyton said.
The Leadership Coaching program “is pretty unique to the United States,” Peyton said.
Morgenstern said one of the challenges was coming up with a leadership program “from scratch.”
“Our hope is that any student … will be encouraged to think beyond just resume, cover letter, interview and networking,” Morgenstern said.
Several other university officials are encouraged by the new program’s prospects.
“It’ll be fun to see how … people who went through the process thought about it, and if they thought it added to their overall competencies and what they feel comfortable with as a student,” said Dean of Students Jenny Hall-Jones.
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The center also offers a half-semester class worth two credit hours.
Launched in Fall 2013, Career Planning in the Liberal Arts is offered three days a week in Baker 503.
Students can learn about and develop skills required in all aspects of career planning.
“The course was developed to help first-year students begin intentional career planning as early as possible in their college career,” Lindsey Marx, associate director and instructor of the course, said in an email.
Some students who have already taken the class believe it has helped shape the rest of their undergraduate career.
“Taking the course with the CLDC has provided me with so many resources linked to their office, and I have used these resources outside of class,” Emily Burrell, a freshman studying communication studies, said in an email. “I would definitely agree that I feel better about how to handle my employment prospects even as a freshman.”
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