Enhancing Essential Professional Skills workshops

Enhancing Essential Professional Skills

The goal of the program Enhancing Essential Professional Skills is to equip women with the necessary skills to effectively and creatively manage their teams just before they begin their independent careers.

Enhancing Essential Professional Skills aims to deliver skills training to prepare scientists to meet the interpersonal challenges they will encounter throughout their postdoctoral experience and beyond.

Critical to success in the postdoctoral experience and beyond is a researcher’s ability to communicate and manage complex issues and concerns among multiple levels of people and roles within an academic or an industry setting. A series of three workshops will lay the foundation for the kind of interpersonal awareness and skills required to promote satisfying work relationships and functional work teams. The interactive workshops will introduce basic communication concepts such as active listening, open questioning, and giving and receiving feedback, and build on that foundation to introduce the theory and skills linked to group dynamics and leadership. Such skills will be appropriate to effectively interact with or facilitate groups and teams of people, whether the goal is to brainstorm ideas, solve problems or make group decisions.

Three interactive workshops will be offered throughout the 2009-10 academic year. Two will be half day sessions facilitated by Sally Halliday, and one will be a half day facilitated by Julie Stitt. Workshops will be offered in November 2009 and February 2010.

Workshop One: Basic Communication Skills: Enhancing Interpersonal Communication (Facilitator: Sally Halliday)
• Outline workshop objectives
• Introduction of basic communication theory
• Skill introduction and practice: active listening, clarifying, paraphrasing
• Using questions to understand and clarify
• Giving and receiving feedback
• Action Plan: linking knowledge to action

Workshop Two: Team Dynamics & Skills (Facilitator: Sally Halliday)
• Overview of group dynamics theory
• The role of Leader/Facilitator: can it ever be neutral?
• What makes a good group Facilitator?
• Basic skills for leading work teams
• Dealing with challenging situations
• Action Plan: linking knowledge to practice

Workshop Three: Salary Negotiation (Facilitator: Julie Stitt)
• What is salary negotiation?
• What will you negotiate for? (What factors do you need to consider? What information do you need to have at your fingertips?)
• What do you want in your work experience?
• How will you use your budget, your financial goals and the “going rate” for a position in your negotiations?
• What strategy do you use when having the “Negotiation” conversation?

Specific details on dates, location and registration to follow.

Funding generously provided by the JADE Project.

Facilitator bios:

Sally Halliday, M.A. RCC (Counselling Psychology) is principal of Sally Halliday Counselling and Consulting Services. In addition to counselling individuals and couples in her private practice and Employee Assistance work, Sally develops and teaches courses at UBC Life and Career Centre. Sally combines her academic research on transitions with her practical experience as a teacher, counsellor and former journalist to help others who are making decisions during times of change. Sally teaches skiing in her spare time.

Julie Stitt is an organisational development specialist at the University of British Columbia. Julie spent a decade working in all facets of career development from directing UBC’s Career Services to writing curriculum for Women in Trades programs. As Manager of Organisational Development and Training (UBC Land and Building Services) Julie combines her facilitation skills with her passion for organizational development in a role that focuses on increasing the organisational effectiveness of one of UBC’s largest divisions. She has a B.A. from Queen’s, post-baccalaureate certificates in Human Resources and Internet Marketing, and an M.A. in Leadership and Training. She has served on the boards of a number of not-for-profit organisations and has trained not-for-profit board directors through Volunteer Vancouver. She lives in Vancouver with her partner and two sons.