8 Clock Hours
Gratitude, Humility, Empathy, Care, and Kindness are essential elements when fostering “soft skill” development. If these deeper phenomena are not considered, soft skill work in coaching and counseling becomes an exercise in pantomiming behaviors versus real client change. This course provides you with a 5-part model for thinking more deeply about how you foster soft skill development in your career services practice.
Soft skills is a term that is used so ubiquitously that many may hesitate to define it even though they have a deep sense of its meaning.
The focus of this course is the development of client capacities upon which soft skills are learned. To use a gardening metaphor, it matters whether or not a seed is planted in a bed of fertilized soil, sand, or gravel. Similarly, it matters whether a client is practicing soft skills with you, a career services professional, at a shallow level or from a deeper more meaningful place.
My goal for this course is to give you a different on-line course experience. One that encourages you to ask questions that have remained unasked, to think deeply about your own experiences of work, and to shift your career services practice to better incorporate ideas that are foundational to human flourishing and happiness as they relate to soft skill development.
The primary audience for this course is any career services professional (e.g., coaches, facilitators, human resource professionals, counselors, psychologists). The principles forming the foundation of this course call upon the fields of career development, positive psychology, and neuroscience research.
This course has five major lessons. In each you may be asked to read text or documents, view web links videos, internalize what you are learning when you write in your course journal, and answer questions about the course content on a worksheet.
Your Instructor: Brian Hutchison
Brian Hutchison, Ph.D., LPC, CCCE is a member of the core faculty in counselor education at Walden University. Dr. Hutchison received his doctorate degree in Counselor Education & Supervision from Pennsylvania State University and has worked as a career, school, and mental health counselor and clinical supervisor.
Dr. Hutchison is the Past-President of the Asia Pacific Career Development Association (APCDA), Editor of the Asia Pacific Career Development Journal, and past Treasurer of the National Career Development Association (NCDA).
Brian’s scholarship is infused into three primary scholarship areas: international issues in career/ school counseling, career theory and practice integration, and counselor training/ education broadly defined. He has more than four dozen journal publications pertaining to school and career counseling theory, international career development, social justice and cross-cultural communication, and specific counseling interventions. Dr. Hutchison is a Contributing Editor for the book International Practices of Career Services, Credentialing and Training.
Brian’s career consultation and education work operates within the brand of Global Career Guy where he specializes in developing career education products and programs, on-line career coaching and mentorship, and web-based education and networking tools for global career professionals.
You will be able to:
Understand how gratitude is a key reinforcer of happiness and thus central to fostering healthy career development behavior.
Connect humility to gratitude and apply these concepts to fostering “soft skills” with clients.
Deepen your work with empathy as it allows career clients to navigate career development and workplace processes effectively.
Identify care as a skill, particularly effective care as it helps clients cope with career stress and the gig economy.
Focus on kindness as an outcome of coaching and counseling, particularly kindness towards self and one’s community of care.
