Next Step Partners' workshops are interactive programs for first and second year business school students, MBA alumni and career management professionals. Our reality-based approaches to complex career issues are based on our work with leading business schools across the country, with numerous executives from a variety of industries, and the expertise of our own Partners and Consultants.

Workshops may be delivered separately as individual modules, or as part of a larger workshop series. Each program is tailored to your audience, accommodates various group sizes, and is customized to fit your desired timeframe, with workshops lasting from 1 to 3 hours in duration. All workshop participants receive a copy of program exercises and materials.

Workshop topics include:

Creating a Career Marketing Plan
Crack the Case!
Conducting an Effective U.S. Job Search: A Workshop for International Students
Networking: Building Relationships for Career Success
Ace the Interview!
Negotiation Strategies: Optimizing Compensation & Benefits
Resumes and Cover Letters
Designing Your Career: From Vision to Reality
Myers Briggs Step II: Interpretation and Insights

Train The Trainer:
NEW! Train the Trainer: Using the MBA Career Handbook for Optimal Results
NEW! Train the Trainer: Creating High-impact Workshops
Train the Trainer: Crack the Case!
Train the Trainer: Career Coaching Essentials
Train the Trainer: Conducting Effective Mock Interviews

Creating a Career Marketing Plan
Our most popular offering! This program applies the framework of a business marketing plan to managing one’s career. Students are encouraged to think proactively and strategically about their career management and building their professional brand, while identifying actionable steps for their job searches.

Crack the Case!
This workshop leverages Next Step Partnersą experience working with consultants from Bain, McKinsey, Booz Allen, BCG, and Accenture. Students gain a clear understanding of case interview competencies, learn straightforward approaches to tackling cases, and have opportunities for practice and feedback in a safe environment.

Conducting an Effective U.S. Job Search: A Workshop for International Students
Led by executive coaches who have worked and lived in Europe, Asia and Latin America, this workshop empowers international students to leverage their strengths and proactively manage the legal, cultural and communication challenges that add complexity to their U.S. job searches. This is an excellent way to help build the confidence and skills of international students in the job-search process.

Networking: Building Relationships for Career Success
This workshop broadens students' understanding of and competence in networking. The program allows students to assess their networking competencies, identify specific areas for improvement, and highlight gaps in their personal and professional networks. Participants discuss key networking behaviors and explore alternative perspectives on networking. They then create networking action plans that are consistent with their own interests and values.

Ace the Interview!
This workshop helps students hone their interviewing skills and present themselves as compelling job candidates. Interviewing frameworks are provided and participants gain hands-on practice and valuable peer feedback through "mini" mock interviews. Various types of interview questions are discussed with examples of effective and ineffective responses. Emphasis is placed on interview preparation and research, competency assessment, behavioral interviewing, responding to tough interview questions, and non-verbal communication.

Negotiation Strategies: Optimizing Compensation & Benefits
Negotiating skills are vital in helping students capitalize on their current and potential value to an employer both upon graduation, and later in their careers. In this workshop, specific negotiating challenges are addressed and alternative strategies are discussed, thereby de-mystifying the negotiation process. Through various exercises, including case studies and mock negotiations, students put into practice these key negotiation strategies, preparing them for compensation discussions with hiring managers to yield optimal results.

Resumes and Cover Letters
Fundamental to any job search are a results-oriented, professional looking resume and cover letter that make a persuasive and compelling introduction. This program works with students to turn their experience and prior resumes into high-impact marketing tools that effectively position them as candidates and target a business audience. Do's and don'ts, best practices and best of class examples are shared.

Designing Your Career: From Vision to Reality
Before businesses engage in planning, they establish their values and a vision for the future that will guide their decisions. When individuals do the same, they start the career planning process with a framework that creates a natural focus and a compelling platform for action towards a career that is a good fit for them. In this program, students clearly articulate their values and create a long-term personal and professional vision. The process creates greater self awareness and focus for the next step in their career search.

Myers Briggs Step II: Interpretation and Insights
Career management begins with a thoughtful and thorough self-assessment. Of the many assessment tools available, the Myers Briggs Step II interpretive report provides an excellent framework to help individuals think about their next step and overall career direction. We use the Step II exclusively because it provides greater depth and detail than the original Myers Briggs report. The session focuses on how to apply the Myers Briggs results to the exploration of career options and identifying careers that are consistent with and supportive of certain personality types. Implications of one's personality type on the job search are also examined.
 

Train the trainer workshops are specifically oriented to Career Center staff and student career advisors.

Train the Trainer: Using the MBA Career Handbook for Optimal Results
Next Step Partners' MBA Career Handbook offers a wealth of structured activities to help MBA students proactively achieve their goals. This program teaches Career Center staff how to maximize the value of the handbook and adapt it to their own needs. The program explains key exercises and provides an opportunity for Career Center staff to consult with Next Step Partners on ways to best structure one-on-one or small-group student learning experiences.

Train the Trainer: Creating High-Impact Workshops
This program teaches best practices for creating effective in-house career workshops that are engaging, relevant, and have a direct positive impact on students’ job searches. The basic, three-hour session outlines the elements of workshop design, guides participants in creating effective, interactive learning activities, and provides opportunities for Career Center staff to further develop new workshop content. The full-day version of the workshop goes a step further in guiding participants to create a specific career workshop using the principles discussed above, and gives participants the opportunity to practice and receive feedback on their delivery.

Train the Trainer: Crack the Case!
This workshop prepares Career Center staff and student advisors to deliver case interviews with confidence, so that students can be prepared for these unique interviews and avoid common pitfalls. Participants review case interview competencies, become familiar with the frameworks used in case interviews, walk through sample cases, and conduct mock interviews in which they take on the role of the interviewer. There is ample opportunity for discussion and feedback about the most effective ways to help students prepare. This is an excellent vehicle to help launch a mock interview program that focuses on case interviews.

Train the Trainer: Career Coaching Essentials
This workshop provides practical, easy to apply career coaching tools to effectively address the most common issues that students face. Participants learn to move beyond giving advice to facilitating highly productive discussions on career alternatives and coaching students to action. A great way to build a school's capacity to provide career-development assistance.

Train the Trainer: Conducting Effective Mock Interviews
For this program, participants are trained in the effective preparation and delivery of interviews, as well as the delivery of feedback to students who are being mock-interviewed, so that the learning for the candidates is optimized and their performance in actual job interviews is maximized.

Mock interviewers are typically either Career Center Staff or second year students who are carefully selected as student career advisors based on their success in job interviews and their standing in the business school community.

Contact us for more information on how we can lead a workshop for your students.