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CareerLeader & 360 Evaluation
First task: Complete career leader evaluation and ask your colleagues to complete a 360 evaluation.
The Parker Career Series uses a career assessment tool called CareerLeader. CareerLeader looks at the combination of your skills, interests, and rewards (motivators) to help you set the course for career success and satisfaction. CareerLeader is built on solid, ongoing scientific research to help you build and understand your unique profile and guide you to create an effective plan to reach your career goals. We will do this together in the Parker Career Series during the summer term. CareerLeader will:
- Generate a personalized report that suggests how to effectively approach a business career
- Match you to specific business-related careers, comparing your profile to a database of 500,000 business professionals
- Help you identify the all-important organizational cultures that are likely to be the best fit for you.
We will use all of these insights to shape your brand, value proposition, resume, cover letters, go to market strategy, and interviews.
Here are the instructions:
1) Visit: www.careerleader.com and click the Register/Sign In button in the upper right corner
2) Under USERS click the “First Time?” button
3) Enter your personal email address (make sure to use your personal email that Anderson has been using to contact you) along with your registration key: anderson-opera
4) You will create your password and then log into the user portal
5) After completing a profile you will be brought to the main dashboard screen where you will begin each of the three assessments
6) Upon completion of all 3 tests you will be able to retrieve all of your results from the main dashboard screen by clicking on any of the tiles. These tests should take approximately 1 hour to complete.
7) Instructions: Ask 6-8 colleagues to complete a “360 evaluation” for you. This evaluation (ideally, coming from a superior(s), peer(s), and subordinate(s) – hence 360 degrees) will provide a more objective perspective on your strengths and weaknesses. It is also a nice way to share the news with your colleagues that you are going to business school and to use the opportunity to ask them the favor to complete this anonymous evaluation of you to help inform your decisions in business school. To solicit feedback direct your potential respondents to www.careerleader.com/feedback. You will need to provide them with the email address that you used when you registered your CareerLeader account (probably the same email where you received this message). They will enter YOUR email address and select their language option, then they will be brought into the portal where they will rate you on the same 48 skills that you self-rated on. You need a minimum of 4 responses to your request for feedback before you will be able to view your results, we recommend soliciting from 6-8 people in order to ensure the best results. Once you have received a minimum of 4 responses you will be able to view your feedback results in the Skills section of your user portal.
8) To access the Resource Library click on the Resources drop down menu across the top or, from any of the results screens you may click on live links which will open the Resource library in a new tab
9) Please complete your own self-assessment prior to the start of orientation on July 31. Ask your colleagues to complete the anonymous assessment prior to leaving your role.
Class of 2025 Networking Spreadsheet
One of the most important aspects of your MBA experience is getting to know your classmates and building your Anderson network. Not only is this important to make the two years of your Anderson experience as fruitful and enjoyable as possible, but also to share success both personally and professionally throughout your career and lifetime. To facilitate this, we created the Class of 2025 Networking Spreadsheet. We encourage you to begin this process by sharing your basic information with one another and begin networking even before you arrive on campus. Try to fill in your information right away, so that you can start to connecting with one another as soon as possible. This sheet is shareable and can be accessed by anyone with the link, so please keep that in mind when adding your information and only share the link with other Class of 2025 Anderson students.
TIP: If you haven’t done this year, we encourage you to customize your LinkedIn profile with a vanity URL (i.e. just use your first and last name – it’s simplest), using these instructions. You’ll be using your vanity URL in your email signature, resume, and even business cards.
Informational Interviews With Classmates
The networking spreadsheet is a useful tool that can be used to reach out to classmates who work at your target industries/roles/companies (or just want to get to know better) and set up time to learn about their work and life. This will serve as great training for conducting informational interviews with alumni, company reps, and senior employees, which you will be doing regularly once you start at Anderson. We strongly recommend holding off on contacting alumni and senior employees until the fall, but you can start these conversations with your classmates now.
If you are unsure what to ask during informational interviews with your classmates, here are some general questions that you can ask in this phase (questions will evolve over time):
- I’d love to hear more about your background. How did you position yourself for this field?
- I’m sure there’s no typical day, but can you tell me about what kind of projects you’ve been working on recently?
- What did you like most about your job? What do you like the least?
- Why are you getting your MBA now and how does this fit into your career plans?
Check out more question examples here.
After having an informational, adapt and use the SAMPLE Network Tracking Sheet (second worksheet) as your own CRM tool to record your interactions, plan your follow-up, and strategically guide your networking. This is a straightforward but powerful spreadsheet, which you can set up to access anywhere or any time. Feel free to customize it with additional columns and tabs you find helpful. Preparing a tracking sheet is also one of your future deliverables for the Parker Series, so you can get a head start now. We will provide additional details on how to build this out further later in the summer.
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Meet Your Parker Career Series Instructor:
Marcus Castain (’98)
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Name: Marcus Castain
Hometown: Fremont, CA & Culver City, CA
College and Major: UC Berkeley, Political Economy
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Marcus is the primary instructor of the Parker Career Series course in the Summer and Fall quarters, and one of the Career Advisors.
Former Roles: Research assistant at an international affairs think tank before business school; Management consulting at PwC; Product management at two EdTech start-ups; Director at The Broad Foundation (focused on urban education reform); Associate Director for Education, Youth, and Families for the City of Los Angeles; Founder/CEO of a nonprofit focused on green jobs; CEO of a nonprofit focused on incarcerated youth; Associate Director of Graduate Career Services at USC Marshall
Why Parker? Welcome to Anderson! 27 years ago, I was excited to start my own Anderson experience. After an exciting career where I have held a broad range of different leadership roles, I realized that I most enjoy helping young professionals find their career passion and achieve their career goals. I’m thrilled to continue leading Parker’s career education programs at Anderson. I look forward to meeting you in August and learning about your passions and how you plan to change the world!
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