Dependable Strengths

There is a variety of help out there for career changers between classes, books, career assessment tests, personality tests, and career counseling - none of which comes with a garantee of finding a new career but nevertheless could be helpful tools to support us in making more informed decisions in our job search. The most recent class that I took was offered by the UW Career Services Center in Seattle, WA. Here is the link:

University of Washington. Seattle, WA
Dependable Strengths Seminar
http://depts.washington.edu/careers/careerplan/depstrg.php

The Dependable Strengths model was developed by someone called Bernard Haldane originally to help military personnel to find jobs after they leave the military. Later on, this technique is now applied to all career changers. For more info, go to http://www.dependablestrengths.org.

The UW Career Services Center uses this model for their Dependable Strengths seminar. Basically, the idea is to list your good experiences (a good experience being an activity that you did well, you enjoyed doing, and that you were proud of). The strengths are then extracted from these good experiences and distilled into a list of top dependable strengths which are then used to write your own report (which is a brief version of a resume that focuses on your strengths and links them with the activities that you achieved). The idea then is to use this report for networking with people (friends and strangers) to get job ideas and referrals for new jobs.

Pros
* It was very helpful to work in groups. The class size was about 10-12 people and several exercises were done in subgroups of 4 people or 2 people. It was good to get other's people reassurance of what our strengths are and practice mock interviews.

* The other thumbs up was that we had a follow-up session one month later. This helped us get the structure to do the homework of networking in the one month timeframe. Most importantly, it helped us reconnect and form an informal support group. We ended up not meeting regularly because of the different locations we live in, but we exchanged email addresses and phone numbers for occasional communication.

Cons
* While the idea behind this seminar is good, I found that the hard part was the implementation. Therefore I think the class format is too short (it was a 2-day class when I took it). We did a networking exercise on the 2nd day when we went out to talk to people on campus and let them recommend job matches for us, which was a disaster for most of us. Of course the idea was to just practice but I still think it was too premature for us to do this. The class should have been offered instead as a quarter class spanning 10 weeks, so we have enough time to explore career ideas, get more assistance from the career counselors, and get assistance in searching for the next job.

The method of extracting strengths employed in this class is very similar to methods described in career change books. For example:

1) What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles
http://www.amazon.com/What-Color-Your-Parachute-2007/dp/1580087949/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_1/002-5557587-5272008

The book has the same idea of listing the activities that you did well and enjoyed doing, and then extract from them the strengths that you utilized. This is done in the "flower exercise".

I read this book several years ago. Basically you get what you put into it. You should take the flower exercise seriously and make an effort to do it. But other than that, I don't remember anything else remarkable about this book.

2) Passion and Purpose by Marlys Hanson
http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Purpose-Identify-Leverage-Powerful/dp/0971721548/sr=1-1/qid=1170621289/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-5557587-5272008?ie=UTF8&s=books

Along the same lines, "Passion and Purpose" also adopts a similar technique to help you list your strengths. However, the difference between this book and the "parachute" book is that this book employs a much more detailed process that guides you in listing your skills. The skills are organized into different categories, and by guiding you through each category and answering questions, you can build your list of strenghts based on your good experiences. So I liked the more detailed approach here. She calls this bundle of strengths the motivational pattern approximation, which sounds to me a very scientific term :-)

Also, what I liked in this book is the idea that each one of us is naturally inclined to do something. So if we observe what we are naturally motivated to do when we are not pressured to do anything in particular, then we will find where our talent and interests lie. And this is not dependent on having explored many things in life. Some people complain that they didn't have the chance to do many things in their life, and they feel trapped by the lack of life experience and use it as an excuse for not being able to discover their strengths. The author argues to the contrary and claims that even if we led simple and unsophisticated lives, our pattern will still show up. For example, if we are naturally inclined to keep things organized and tidy, we will be doing that at home or in the office no matter what circumstances life offers us.