The Sabbatical: a short-short story

Learning to Enhance Your Career

Most readers of my work have at least one degree and if they want more education it's to enhance their career. 

My PsychologyToday.com article today proceeds on those assumptions.

Sometimes, going back to a college or university is necessary. For example, you can’t be a psychotherapist without at least a master's. And in some fields, even if not required, employers tend to prefer advanced degree holders.

But more often than you might think, you can learn more, especially more of practical value to you, at dramatically less cost and far more quickly, through one or more of the following: self-study, just-in-time help at work, tutoring, one-shot classes, longer courses, and conferences.

Of course, if you’re pursuing education to enhance your career, you’ll need to convince the employer that you’ll be at least as good an employee for having attended “You U” than State U. Later in the article, I show you how to do that, indeed that you’re a better candidate.

If you decide you do need a degree, at the end, I discuss how to maximize your chances of admission to that small percentage of schools that actually are highly selective.

The World's Shortest Course in Hiring, Training, and Managing People

As my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer the tactics my clients have found most helpful in hiring, training, and managing people.

Training Smart

Next to hiring, training staff may be a manager or leader's most important task. In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer thoughts on how to do it wisely

Psychotherapist and Counselor Training Reinvented

A large percentage of university-based training time for most professions, including psychotherapists and counselors is spent on theoretical and other academic learning that is far less value to a practitioner than what I propose in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Getting Well-Trained for Your Career

Good training for you career can dramatically affect your competence and confidence. My PsychologyToday.com article today explores how to get great training.

A Great Way to Get Expert Fast

I just finished a session with a client who develops advertising ideas and copy. He works for a second-tier ad agency but would like to move up.

I suggested he create a nugget file. That's simply a word-processing file in which he writes one-line nuggets, each describing a key tool or principle in great advertising. I suggested he find those nuggets by studying the advertising that recently won a national award. (I cautioned against going back to old ads, because the world has changed.) Because it's critical to apply learning right away, I then suggested he apply those nuggets to improving his own website, which will be the "ad" he'll use to sell himself to those big-time ad agencies. He said he loved the idea.

Yesterday, I suggested that another client start a nugget file. He's about to begin landscape architecture school at Cornell. His goal is to specialize in coastline landscape architecture. I suggested he create a nugget file on that specialization and that he gather the nuggets in three ways:

1. Do a Google search for on-target articles and an Amazon search for on-target books.

2. Ask your professor to let you to do assignments and term papers that focus on coastline landscape architecture.

3. During class sessions, listen for nuggets.

Like my ad writer client, he said he is excited about keeping a nugget file.

Should you keep a nugget file on some topic?

You U: A Fast Way to Learn a New Profession

I have acquired professional-level skills in career counseling, journalism, rose hybridizing, screenplay writing, plus strong amateur-level skills as an actor and play director without ever having taken a course (let alone a degree) in any of the above.

I simply:

1. Google the topic to read key articles in the field.

2. Use Amazon to find the best books on the subject.

3. While reading those books, immediately start applying what I've learned: career counseling someone (for free while I was still a neophyte), writing columns and articles, breeding roses, writing a screenplay, auditioning for acting and directing roles.

4. I then solicit feedback from everyone from just-plain folks to world-class experts. For example, I discussed my rose hybridizing efforts with the world's leading hybridizers and visited their facilities. I sent drafts of my articles and screenplays to respected friends and to leading writers for review. I had top career counselors watch me do sessions and I watched them. In preparation for an audition, I took an acting lesson or two.

The results:

-- Over the past 20 years, I've had 2,800 career coaching clients and enjoy a 96% client satisfaction rate. The San Francisco Bay Guardian, on its cover, called me "The Bay Area's Best Career Coach."

-- For six years, I was career columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, for three years at the Los Angeles Times, and now in my third year as Contributing Editor at U.S. News & World Report and columnist for Kiplinger.com.

-- Three of my rose varieties are in commerce, distributed by Bailey's Nurseries, one of the world's premier distributors of no-spraying-required roses.

-- In the last four years, I have had four starring roles in plays. And in my directing debut, I won the Bay Area "Roar of the Crowd" award for the Bay Area's #1 audience-favorite entertainment of the week and "Best Director" award at Chanticleers Theatre.

-- Lew Hunter, Professor and Chair Emeritus of the preeminent UCLA screenwriting program called my screenplay, The Ugly Club, "a uniquely pleasurable experience that will make a wonderful film." Two significant Hollywood film studios are currently considering it.

Of course, you do have to be a self-starter and an apt learner for this learning strategy to work, but if you are, in a surprisingly large array of pursuits, you may be able to forgo State U, let alone Private U, in favor of You U.