Empowering Early Career Development for Women through Leveraging Values
11:10 AM – 12:00 PM • 50 Minute Runtime • Room 205
Survey research shows that many of today’s young women, transitioning from college to career, are driven by a keen sense of progressive values, especially around racial and gender justice. Yet they are launching their career paths in a challenging economic context, a time of instability around professional paths, and in workplaces where rules and norms can challenge their values and integrity. Young women are working hard to build credibility and confidence but are often navigating rigid or simply opaque ideas of what leadership and early career professional development can look like, all while trying to figure out a place for their values and gifts. Workplace self-help literature for women tends to lack a focus on values, implies that leadership is confined to formal roles, perpetuates deficit models and individual solutions, and pays inadequate attention to workplace contexts, not all of which are the corporate environments lauded in best-selling books. This session will explore how diverse young women, supported by others, can build and leverage links between educational systems and early career confidence building, specifically through grounding in values and claiming diverse forms of leadership. Based on oral history interviews across several generations, it will show how early work, college, and graduate school serve as learning and testing platforms for young women trying out their values and voices, while also navigating messages around gender, race, and other systems. The presentation will highlight ways in which, even when young women struggle to navigate the college-workplace transition, they can use their voices to question systems, offer innovative visions for more inclusive practices, and develop their professional identities and leadership capacities around their values. Jodi will share an overview of a developmental framework for emerging women leaders, a framework which offers candid realities about intersectional discrimination and barriers for women, while nurturing confidence through leveraging values, identification of leadership contributions from any position, and collective—not just individual—skill building strategies.
Jodi E. Vandenberg-Daves
Owner • JVD Consulting, LLC