For career services professionals.

Join Katharine Brooks, executive director, career center, Vanderbilt University, and author of the best seller “You Majored in What? Designing Your Path from College to Career” to learn firsthand how research-based career counseling strategies within the Wise Wandering System can empower your client population as it navigates through career exploration.

Based on positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, and chaos theory, along with nonlinear approaches, the Wise Wandering System equips clients with the strategies needed to process, define, and articulate career pathways through active reasoning and application as part of the creative process.

Examine specific factors that impact the career counseling process, such as mindset, negative messaging, and limiting beliefs, while gaining skills needed to examine and interpret system outcomes to support clients served.

Following this program, you will be able to:

• Examine theoretical models as the foundation of the Wise Wandering System,
• Explore strategies for career exploration;
• Use mapping to mitigate client barriers in goal attainment;
• Interpret and analyze mapping strategy to develop themes and pathways for open dialogue and goal setting;
• Develop appropriate and actionable client goals; and
• Mitigate the barriers to career counseling process with storytelling. 

Asynchronous, virtual programming through the NACE Learning Platform.

• Unit Descriptions

  Unit One: NACE Knowledge Assessment
  To enhance and leverage your experience in the Wise Wandering System course, learners must read the text "You Majored in What? Designing Your Path from College to Career" by Katherine Brooks prior to the start of the course.

  Learners must verify their completion of the pre-reading through the NACE Learning Knowledge Assessment by scoring a 75 percent or better prior to beginning the course.

  Unit Two: Introduction to the System
  Following this session, you will be able to:

  • Identify key elements of the Wise Wandering System;
  • Describe the Wise Wandering System for career counseling;
  • Examine system foundation and theoretical models; and
  • Review job-market factors impacting career exploration and development.

  
  

  Unit Three: Discover Your Strengths
  Following this session, you will be able to:

  • Define mind mapping and application for career counseling;
  • Create a wandering map;
  • Categorize themes of the wanderings map; and
  • Examine strategies for mapping with individuals and groups.

  
  

  Unit Four: Develop Your Vision
  Following this session, you will be able to:

  • Identify and assist in overcoming resistance factors;
  • Analyze and guide clients through Possible Lives exercise with individuals and groups; and
  • Distinguish clients' decision-making preference and apply appropriate goal-setting system.

  Unit Five: Design the Path
  Following this session, you will be able to:

  • Create a career action plan with clients;
  • Describe three outcome-focused career planning models; and
  • Use creative processes to move the client through the stages of change.

  
  

  Unit Six: Deliver Your Talents
  Following this session, you will be able to:

  • Use storytelling to develop a Go-to-marketing strategy;
  • Develop actionable client development plans;
  • Identify strategies to mitigate client resistance; and
  • Incorporate the Wise Wandering System for your client population.

• Presenter

  

  Katharine Brooks, Executive Director, Career Center, Vanderbilt University

  Dr. Katharine S. Brooks has been in the career services field since 1986. She is currently the Evans Family executive director of the Vanderbilt University Career Center. Prior to this role, Dr. Brooks was the executive director of the Office of Personal and Career Development at Wake Forest University, director of Liberal Arts Career Services at The University of Texas at Austin, and the director of Career Services at Dickinson College. She is a licensed professional counselor (LPC-Texas), a nationally certified counselor (NCC), and a board-certified coach (BCC). She is the author of You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career. She also writes a blog, “Career Transitions” for Psychology Today. She has a doctorate in educational psychology and a master's degree in rehabilitation counseling from West Virginia University. Her bachelor's degree is in sociology and anthropology from Gettysburg College.

Questions? Contact the NACE Professional Development team via email or phone, 610.625.1026.