Careers that Pay the Bills and Change the World

Emmy Lang-Kennedy (MBA ’13) is a first year Graduate Assistant for the Center For Social Value Creation. She recently attended Dr. Mrim Boutla’s “How to Successfully Compete for Well Paying Career Opportunities in CSR, Social Enterprise, and Sustainable Business”— a two-session series on concretely translating past experience and education into a well-paying job aligned with one’s values.

	Courtesy of morethanmoneycareers.com

Can you make money while following your passion and do good? These are questions that many students ask themselves on a daily basis. On October 4th Dr. Mrim Boutla led a session for MBA students that addressed just these issues. The first of two sessions sponsored by OCS, Net Impact and the Center for Social Value Creation, this workshop led students through a number of frameworks to enhance job searches and help focus our career goals in the social value space. Dr. Boutla is a brain scientist turned career coach and is passionate about empowering emerging and established leaders to match their passions with their career goals and become successful in values-driven careers. During this session students identified their goals, core passions and most important post-MBA career attributes.

In the weeks since the event I have discussed Dr. Boutla’s “Get Clear About Your Fit” framework with many of my classmates. I think it is a great tool to frame job searches and the MBA experience in any sector. This framework, based around the matrix below, is intended to help students drill down into specific functional areas as well as industries, ranging from government to traditional non-profit, from social enterprise to sustainable business. Boutla encouraged students to focus their post-MBA career move on just two cells within the matrix. Focusing on more than two cells can become overwhelming and look scattered to future employers. For example I am interested in green supply chain issues so I am going to focus on the two Operations cells within Social Enterprise and Sustainable Business.

This framework can be applied to any student looking to target their career search by expanding the possible columns and may help students looking for a career with social impact think beyond traditional non-profit or CSR roles.

The second tool that I found most useful was the Career Significance Navigator. This framework, based on the star model below, helped students identify which of the following characteristics matters to them the most in their next career: self-development, material rewards, community, family and prestige. Focused specifically on our post-graduation career move, we answered a series of questions related to each point on the star. Based on our responses we then ranked each characteristic from 1 – 5. Based on our rankings, Boutla helped us identify which sector would be the best fit. For example someone who ranks self-development and material rewards highest may be best working in sustainable business while someone that ranks material rewards and community high should could look into impact investing.

We left the session with a To Do List for the upcoming session in November. The list includes:

1. Identify your function and industry or cause

2. Research target organizations and your minimum salary requirement

3. Develop a promotion plan with specific steps you will take between now and the next session.

Boutla’s next session will take place on November 8th and will guide students through networking and specific steps to put our Career Search Plans into place. I am currently working on my plan, with includes attending the Supply Chain Networking Day and the Net Impact Conference where I hope to identify target organizations and learn more about functional areas where I can work on sustainability issues. I am looking forward to the next session and learning some new strategies to put my action plan into place.

If you were unable to attend the session but would like to learn more about the frameworks used to evaluate your career fit, the full presentation is available on HireSmith under the Document Library.