The first in a series of posts about careers in sustainability by Dr. Boutla, co-founder of More Than Money Careers (MTM Careers). UNC Kenan-Flagler has established a strong partnership with MTM Careers to help students get clear, get connected and get hired in sustainability careers. The following is an excerpt from the MTM Careers blog. Read the full post.
By Dr. Mrim Boutla, co-founder, More Than Money Careers
Dr. Mrim Boutla
Our collaboration with UNC Kenan-Flagler started over a year ago, with Katrin Baker from their Career Management Center (CMC) and Tracy Triggs-Matthews participating in our online staff training. This guaranteed that students would receive consistent strategic advice and resources whether they asked their career questions to CMC or CSE staff. Seeing the value of our process and resources, UNC Kenan-Flagler invited us to lead an in-person staff training to further expand the effectiveness for all CMC and CSE staff working with impact-driven students. Finally, UNC Kenan-Flagler students gained access to our career modules in August 2012.
Tracy reported that our partnership led to the following results:
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Many programs and professional associations have initiatives focused on providing resources and training to students. We are different. We leverage the fact that the university staff members and faculty we work with remain at their university on average longer than students. As a result, our university partners benefit from a lasting change when it comes to maximizing career coaching effectiveness with impact-driven and traditional students and alumni.
During our session with Tracy and our session with chapter leaders, we were honored to receive overwhelmingly positive feedback about our Career Opportunities Map. Students, working professionals, and university staff found how we organize mission-driven jobs by skill sets or function (as rows of our map), and sectors (as columns of our map) transformational in terms of putting order in the chaos of social and environmental change jobs (download our map with examples of Net Impact community members for each cell). As a recovering cognitive neuroscientist, I couldn’t be happier about this feedback, because, to quote Oliver Wendell Homes, ‘a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions’.