Workplace Navigation Training

Goal: Provide students/trainees/employees with the knowledge, skills, support and clarity they need to effectively assess and successfully navigate any lab environment and achieve their professional and career goals.

Interactive Zoom Workshops

Utilizing an Interview to Determine a "Good Fit"

• Presenter: Naledi Saul, MPM, Director, UCSF Office of Career and Professional Development

• Summary: Go beyond focusing solely on presenting yourself as the optimal candidate and utilize the interview to determine if an internship/job opportunity is a “Good Fit” for you! In this workshop you’ll gain strategies to clarify your career and educational goals and frame questions to obtain accurate information to assess if a workplace will support those goals, while also learning to recognize potential misalignments.

Workshop participants will come away with strategies to:

• Define what a ‘bad fit' or 'toxic work environment’ is

• Outline and clarify your own goals before the interview

• Use questions during an interview to determine whether a workplace is in alignment with your goals and values

• Articulate strategies and practice language to frame questions

• Describe examples of verbal and non-verbal red flags indicating the opportunity may not be a “Good Fit”

• Describe factors that can make it difficult to recognize and weigh the potential impact of red flags during and after an interview

For related frameworks and tools please see Identifying Goals & Values (Preparation) & Positioning & Connecting (Interviewing)

Establishing Yourself in a New Position

• Presenter: Naledi Saul, MPM, Director, UCSF Office of Career and Professional Development

• Summary: To establish a successful working relationship with your mentor-manager, it's important to assess and understand key factors including their priorities, goals and workstyles as well as your own. In this interactive session, we will discuss best practices using real-life examples and explore how good intentions without proactive communication strategies can lead to misunderstandings in the workplace. You will learn what to pay attention to from the start, tangible actions you should take, and how to measure the success of your working relationship with your mentor-manager in order to set yourself up for success.

Workshop participants will come away with strategies to:

• Clarify and assess you and your mentor-manager’s goals, priorities, and values.

• Assess your workstyle and that of your mentor-manager (and other colleagues)

• Scope your situation: Utilize an investigative (proactive) approach to assess the 4 key factors in your workplace: the work, your boss, the team, and the organization

For related frameworks and tools please see Establishing Your Working Relationship (First 10%)

Managing Expectations: Asking for & Obtaining Feedback

• Presenter: Dr. Karen Leung, CCSF Bioscience Internship Program

• Summary: Meeting or exceeding expectations is a defining metric of success in the workplace. There are multitudes of expectations, many of which often go unsaid. How do you clarify what is expected of you and obtain regular actionable feedback so that you can progress steadily towards those expectations? In this session we’ll outline tools you can use to define the many expectations inherent in any work situation, assess for gaps in your knowledge and build the language to ask for and obtain the information and feedback you need to succeed.

Workshop participants will come away with strategies to:

• Assess what expectations have been made clear, and which still need further clarity.

• Identify gaps in expectations, how you’ll be evaluated, assessed and trained.

• Language to obtain expectation clarity and actionable feedback.

• Proactively manage-up to promote actions that support your success

For related frameworks and tools please see Establishing Your Working Relationship (First 10%) & Workplace Navigation (Maintaining Momentum)

Negotiating for What You Need

• Presenter: Naledi Saul, MPM, Director, UCSF Office of Career and Professional Development

• Summary: A career conversation with your mentor-manager is essentially a negotiation. It's a time to discuss your career path, what types of support your mentor-manager is willing and able to offer, and the level of productivity they'll need to see to continue to support you. Using best practices from Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Stone, Patton, Heen and Fisher), participants will go through the steps of preparing for a negotiation (including identifying conversational goals and concerns about the conversation, assessing their research mentor's position and preferences, etc.), brainstorm different conversational tactics for each stage of a negotiation (including opening the conversation, negotiating different issues, coming to agreement and ending a conversation) and consider steps post-conversation.

Workshop participants will come away with strategies to:

• Identify the steps to prepare for a career conversation

• Consider how your mentor-manager would prefer to have this conversation

• Develop talking points to keep the conversation on track

• Discuss how to open, have and exit the conversation

• Identify strategies if a conversation becomes contentious

• Describe next steps post-conversation(s)

For related frameworks and tools please see Workplace Navigation (Maintaining Momentum)