Professional Interpreting Services in Community and Public Services

Leadership Open Mic - Fishbowl Discussion with Ahmad Maaliji & Angela Sasso

This session will present the importance of professional interpretation in the community and employment services sectors. Many organizations still depend on volunteers to interpreter at various one to one or group settings due to lack to trained and professional community interpreters. As Options BC have been implementing a PBLMT Program in partnership with the Interpreter's Lab; we will use this opportunity to highlight how different sectors can benefit by working with professional interpreters. Following a brief presentation, there will be an open Mic in the format of a fishbowl discussion where every participant in the session can have an opportunity to comment or ask questions.

Assessing Social-Emotional Skills for Workplace Success

Leadership Panel with Pam Khinda, Paul Brinkhurst & Kristin Vandegriend                   

Job seekers need to demonstrate a wide range of soft skills to stand out to employers. The Employability Skills Assessment Tool (ESAT) supports learners in assessing and developing their social and emotional skills through self-assessment and instructor observation. Learn more about ESAT and how it is being used at Vancouver Community College and across Canada. 

Set-Up for Success

Managers Workshop with Terry Deakin

Do you know how people who experience barriers to employment continue to be underrepresented in our evolving labour market? And they are also most likely to be underserved in our employment programs. Set-Up for Success provides you with tools and strategies to add to any program to facilitate personal growth and development toward a successful labour market attachment.

Preventing the Spin Cycle: In Motion & Momentum+

Leadership Workshop with Donnalee Bell & Trina Stanford    

This session aims to solve the problem of burnout, lack of work-life balance, and the feeling of having life squeezed out of oneself. By providing practical tips and strategies, Glynis helps participants achieve a more fulfilling and energizing life.

SkillingUp - Building Digital Equity and Financial Security

Managers Workshop with Lisa Livingston

SkillingUp, a partnership between MODC, Microsoft and CIBC that invests in all stages of employment, including one to one pre-job/career and post-job/career support. This includes free digital literacy training, career essential training and Microsoft certifications as well as mentoring and networking opportunities and job development support. The program supports job seekers to increase their employability in tech and “tech-enabled” jobs.

Indigenous Skills for Success Journey

Leadership Workshop with Danica Isherwood & Francesca De Bastiani      

Explore the updated Indigenous Skills for Success Journey Refresh Project. The interactive and engaging workshop facilitates connection with like-minded colleagues while presenter led activities guide you to put the skills framework into practice with relevant scenarios. Includes the opportunity to try out some exciting new learner activities and come away with new tools to add to your tool kit.

Skills for Success: Assessing Transferable Skills

Managers Presentation by Noah Arney

Supporting the self-assessment of transferable skills means that clients are more able to develop themselves and be open to transformational experiences. This session will present a subjective reports assessment based on the Skills for Success framework (2021), designed to assess skills that are easily displayed in practice, but difficult to assess outside of practice.

Using Digital Tools to Boost Learning and Participation

Managers Presentation by Giselle Shangi-Ellis & Janessa Stuerle

In this presentation Giselle and Janessa will explore some of our favourite digital tools. They consider the application of the tools in the career development field and introduce attendees to a gamified approach to learning. These experienced Instructional Designers will demonstrate how they implement digital tools and resources in a way that removes barriers, allowing all clients to fully participate.

Relational Effectiveness: The Client as Your Compass

Leadership Workshop with Desiree Carlson & Cassie Taylor

Career development leaders are increasingly being called to support complex, diverse, and multi-barriered clients within our dynamic employment landscape. At the same time, they’re tasked with streamlining service provision with an equally diverse staff often new to the sector. This workshop calls for a refocusing on cultivating strong relational competencies grounded in sensitivity, dignity, and understanding through an authentic, compassionate, and empathic approach. Leave equipped to create spaces for collaboration and growth for yourself, your staff, and clients.

Employer Support: The Pathway to Job Seeker Success

Managers Workshop with Johanna Currie

Join us as we look at employers through a new lens and discover the key to successful employer connections. Learn to leverage your existing skills and apply analysis tools to identify value adds that will have a long-term impact on employers. Explore how adding value and building relationships through employer support leads to fulfilling and meaningful work for all job seekers.

Medicine Wheel - how to use for job search activity

Presentation by Coreen Jenner

The workshop involves group interaction as well as using handouts to have participants develop their own life and how it relates to them. In this workshop participants will learn how to use the wheel to engage in positive job search activities to share with clients.

Sector Sustainability: Leader Mentorship Discussion

Leadership Discussion Panel 

Career Development Professional Centre Training: A Fireside Chat

Leadership Panel with Roberta Borgen, Seanna Quressette & Candy Ho

Strategic Plan Implementation

Leadership Workshop with JP Baker

Translate your goals into action!   Good strategic plans don’t just live on a shelf. They live through effective operational planning and ground-level decisions about programming, finances, hiring, and more. In this workshop, we will explore the different ways that strategic plans are converted into actions and decisions. This may involve structural changes, leadership support, community engagement, resource allocation, and capacity building. It may also involve operational planning and embedding values into organizational processes and policies.  

Reimagining Organizations in a Climate Change Disrupted World

Presentation by Arden Henley & Ingrid Kastens

In Canada, the policy push in public career and employment services to get clients as quickly as possible into jobs and training has created a spin-cycle. People with pre-employment skills needs are moved too soon to training and/or jobs and find themselves in a costly revolving door cycling from the labour market to service over and over. In 2015, the Canadian Career Development Foundation, with the Government of New Brunswick, moved to stop the spin with an innovative program called In Motion & Momentum+.  This session will explore the “now for something completely different” approach taken to revolutionize career and employment services in New Brunswick and the process of scaling this innovation across Canada to support the more than 85% of people coming to service with pre-employment needs.

Social Procurement: A National Call to Action

Presentation to come.

First impressions count: Re-imagining the intake process

Leadership Presentation by Annika Laale & Rebecca McCarthy                 

Most employment services have intake processes, but are they effective? Intake is a critical opportunity to build trust and engagement, ensuring the individual’s strengths and needs inform service delivery. It is the lynchpin of quality service. Come and explore a strength-based process that also captures meaningful data on the client’s career development journey from the first meeting.

Color Spectrums - Personality Styles Workshops

Presentation by Coreen Jenner

Colour Spectrums is a personality model presented to groups in an interactive and entertaining workshop format. Participants sort the 4 colourfully illustrated attribute cards to identify their natural Colourspectrums - a combination of the 4 developmental areas of personality.  Participants are guided through a process of self-reflection, group discussions and activities to discover and celebrate diverse personality strengths.

Our Role in the Social Determinants of Mental Health

Leadership Workshop with Catherine Hajnal & Seanna Quressette

We will explore the social determinants of mental health as they intersect with the work of Career Development.  Participants will leave with the beginnings of map of trauma-informed referrals.  This will include an exploration of the continuum of crisis to prevention and our role along that continuum. Through discussion learn how to contribute to the mental health of clients. 

Ministry Update

By Joanna White & Karen Blackman