Job Coaching

Location: Open Door Shelter

Date: Monday, August 24, 2015; 6:45-8:30 pm

Two weeks ago I was supposed to lead and had planned the entire session.  I was even wearing a suit to demonstrate professionalism in a work environment.  However, when I arrived there, the lights were out and so they made us leave.  Apparently they did not want any liability.  Since my volunteers had already arrived, I had spoken with them about the place and urged them to return.  I had also mentioned that I would pass on the lesson to the leader with whom I had switched weeks.  But then there was a fiasco when I wrote to that leader, since they had thought that not only was I covering for them, but would also lead in my own slot as well.  After corresponding with Amy, I decided to lead this one and dropped out of another project that I had signed up for.  Thank the heavens that I had written to the leader, else volunteers would have come and not known what to do.

One of our activities for this evening

As usual, after sending my welcome email people started dropping off.  I recruited my colleague Katie and we arrived at the site just before 6:30.  Our activities for tonight were “Compass Point Assessment” – same as “Myers Briggs” or “DISC Analysis”, but with “North”, “South”, “East” and “West” aligning with personality styles.  The main lesson was how to prepare for a “Promotional Interview”, where you are not necessarily applying for a specific job.  Once all of my volunteers had assembled, we went upstairs and I gathered the youth together at the table.  For introductions, I said that we should say our name and then what was our favorite thing about the “Fall” season.  One youth was very enthusiastic to go first and so I said that we would start with her.  She said that her favorite thing was “Halloween”.  A couple of folks said “Color of leaves”, which was to be expected.  Some had birthdays and some said Thanksgiving.  A few said that they did not like the season and I said that they could say that their favorite thing was that “Winter” was on its way!  I said that my favorite thing was the month of October, saying that I am yet to have a bad October and I love everything about it. 

I said that we had a lot to cover and so I paired up the youth with the volunteers using a number system - 1’s paired with 1’s etc. - and said that rather than doing the “ice breaker” exercise separately and getting back together, we would all be doing it at the same time.  People liked this and we started with the “Compass Point Assessment”, where  I asked the volunteers to do it along with the youth.  While it was a fun exercise, there were a lot of questions that needed to be answered in order to get the statistical analysis and some people were getting a bit impatient.  Some questions were tricky since there were 2 choices and both made sense.  I encouraged them to focus more on the professional context.  The youth were having a good time with this exercise and when their results were announced, were saying things like “It’s totally me”.  In one of the groups we had a male who finished with a “Direct style” and female with a “Caring style”.  She said that she would never be his boss and I said that it wasn’t true since there was a way through which someone with her style could be a leader or even a manager and she just need to have the right people in their team.  I mentioned how this was so that people learn how to respond to each other where the one with “Caring style” need to keep their communication with “Direct” people to the point and the one with “Direct style” need to understand that their personality can cause feelings to get hurt. 

We moved to the informational interview session and people were writing down some questions since I had said that the youth should use the questions to interview the volunteers and find out more about their careers.  One girl who was with Katie was totally into it and writing pages and pages of notes.  I walked about and asked some folks what they wanted to be when they grew up.  One said a “Software Engineer” some wanted to go into “Child Care”.  This was a good exercise and youth seemed engaged.  With 10 minutes to go, I called everyone together for reflection.  As with other times, I took the usual route of handing out candy for every comment and we had some good ones from the youth, including deep analysis on personality types.  It seemed like everyone had learnt something.  I did a reflection with the volunteers and the only criticism was the length of the personality quiz.  Other than that, everyone had a good time.  Claire would be back next month and thus ended another summer of me as a substitute.