Written By: Neelam Dorman, Career Guidance Committee Chair

The Career Guidance Committee is responsible for promoting the advancement of the transportation planning and engineering profession by fostering the close association of senior professionals within the transportation industry, ITE, and young professionals. We are here to engage our young members and help them develop into industry professionals.

What We’ve Done in the Past. As a District we have been recognizing young professionals with the Young Professional Achievement Award and the Best Paper by a Young Professional Award.  We also have been encouraging young professional involvement by recognizing organizations that make a special effort to help young professionals grow. We have also targeted a number of our programs at our future young professionals, our students. The Career Guidance Committee works closely with the Student Initiatives Committee to organize events that will benefit students on their path to the working world and help them see the value in organizations such as ITE.

What We’ve Done Recently. The Committee has developed sessions for the past two Western District Annual Meetings. The first session organized and led by the Committee was in Rapid City as part of a special track running alongside other technical sessions. We ran a session that required many industry professional volunteers and were lucky enough to have the support of so many active members. The session was geared towards students and consisted of on-site resume reviews as well as a skit based interactive session on interviewing for a job in the transportation industry. The job interviews were set up to show good and bad interviewees for each skit (single interviewer and panel interview) as well how to handle the situation with a bad and somewhat inappropriate interviewer. Both the resume review and skits were well received and the session won the Best Session Award at the conference. We also had lessons learned from this first session. We received input from the students that the resume review would better serve them if they could talk through the input rather then look at comments on their paper resumes.

We took this input and revised the student session in Las Vegas to be a speed dating set-up allowing for resume review and career guidance discussions. This session allowed for students to spend time with multiple professionals in both public and private sectors asking questions and getting their input on their resumes. This session was well-received and we received positive input from the student and professional participants.

After our success with the skit based session in Rapid City we decided to develop a session focused towards young professionals. The skits were based on how to deal with situations in the workplace. Skits included how to ask for training or to attend a professional meeting such as an ITE Annual Meeting in Las Vegas. Skits also included how to deal with colleagues that may not be entirely professional. This session was also well received and we’re hoping to continue to build on it.

What We Plan to Do. The Committee has many plans and we hope that it provides both students and younger members with guidance for career and personal development. For the 2016 meeting in Albuquerque, we hope to host three sessions aimed to engage students and young professionals.

We will lead a resume review and career guidance session with the speed dating format. We will need lots of private and public sector volunteers for this session so if would like to help please let me know and I will keep you posted on the plans for the event.

We will also lead a session geared towards young professionals with the skit format. The session will provide guidance for young professionals on various workplace situations. If have any suggestions of workplace situations please send them to me and we will try to include them in our session.

A new session this year is taking inspiration from LeadershipITE. This session will group young professionals with at least a year of work experience in teams to complete a project during the session. The goal of this session is to share ideas, connect with other young professionals, and work as a team to complete a task. As a young professional, we have certain roles in the workplace. Having a team of young professionals tackling a project requires each person to step into different roles and we hope that this will help enlighten our participants as well as challenge them. We hope to have involvement from LeadershipITE graduates in the future to help enhance and expand this session.

What Can We Do Better. The Committee has learned a lot through past and current initiatives. One initiative that has been a challenge is a formal mentorship program. The previous membership program aimed to pair a student member with a professional member within the District. Mentorship cannot be orchestrated or forced which makes it a challenge to formalize. ITE provides great networking and many of our students have found incredible mentors on their own. We do hope to rejuvenate the mentorship program but are weighing options to create the most helpful option. One idea is for the Committee to provide an event to foster mentorship connections naturally between mentors and mentees. Another is to gear the program towards young professionals which would include graduating students as they enter the workforce.

Who Does It All. Our Committee is informal but there are many consistent volunteers that help make these events possible. The ITE Western District Board always takes an active role in our sessions as many of our Western District Chairs and International Board. We have also had great input from a few graduates and teachers from the LeadershipITE program. Thank you to all our volunteers for the resume and career guidance session, we will need you again in Albuquerque! A special thank you to our cast of characters from Las Vegas for our educational and hopefully entertaining skits: Cathy Leong, Kimberly Leung, Mark Spencer, Justin Link, Josh McNeill, and Giancarlo Ganddini.