The Wharton MBA for Executives program in San Francisco has developed a structured, group-based job search program called "Job Search Action Groups" (JSAGs) to address low student satisfaction with traditional career support and to better facilitate career transitions for experienced professionals.
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hello everyone
uh my name is steve hernandez um thank
you for being here
this afternoon uh i am the director
of career advancement for the wharton
mba for executives program based in san francisco
francisco
so i've been doing this for 10 years a
lot of folks are still surprised that
that we have a campus in san francisco
a lot of local people when i tell them i
work for the university of pennsylvania say
say
what do you what okay duke could you
work from home do you commute are you
you've been working virtually for quite
some time no we actually have a
quite a nice campus right here in san
francisco along the embarcadero in fact
it's my background we're right there by
the bridge and so i've been at this for
uh for about 10 years now i support 200
resident first and second year executive
mba students
that attend classes on the weekends now
over the last year we've been
we've moved our program to virtual we
are pretty excited starting this friday
we're coming back in small groups so we
are physically coming back to the campus now
now
uh which is really exciting for us um so
that's a little bit about
my role here uh our steel you're gonna
learn from the presentation a little bit
more about our students but in general they
they
have about 10 to 12 years of experience
a lot of middle
managers to directors we do have some vp
level and senior vp
students and they have a wide range of
backgrounds from
engineering to to their physicians
attorneys many of them already are in business
business
and they're looking to kind of move up
so a strong
strong a lot of diversity in our
populations of the students that i
support so let's dive into it i'm going
to talk about one of our programs
called the job search action groups our
acronym is jsax
and it's become one of our main go-to programs
programs
uh since i've been here i'm going to
talk a little bit about how it came about
about
and how it's uh how it's executed we
like to call it a sort of a wemba job
search wemba is our acronym for
acronym for mba for executives here
wharton mba
for executive um and
um we've kind of sort of created a
workflow process my colleague don graham
is here and she'll be talking to you
next actually talking about her book switchers
switchers
um but the two of us have kind of come
up with this you know
this workflow we execute with our
students when it comes to job search so
i'll talk a little bit more about it let
so when i arrive so uh when they want to
say we we number our classes
we number our class so we just admitted class
class
47. i started with class 35 so that
gives you a sense of
how long i've been here we just
graduated class 45 thus 10 years of
classes so
each cohort is numbered in our since the
executive program started here at wharton
wharton
and so i started with class 35 so um class
class
35 to class 37 was when i began and this
was pre
job search action group so i want to
talk a little bit about why it was
important to do
the job search action groups first when
i came into it low student
satisfaction with career support in san
francisco can you believe that
can you believe that um and
so i'm not going to get into student
satisfaction that's not what this
presentation is but
one aspect of it is obviously job search um
um
there was our keynote speaker yesterday
made that comment
uh which i could totally relate to
saying that you know hey you know the
professors actually think the students
are here to learn something whereas 90
of them want to get a job well yes we're
very academic here at the university of pennsylvania
pennsylvania
for sure but uh here here at wharton you
know our stu
we are well aware that our students want
to take the next step in their career
so um it's important to address that and
at the time
the job market was was it was coming
back in 2011
but it had been pretty flat it was still
pretty flat um 2010
2009 were pretty dismal it's coming back
but it was still pretty flat when i arrived
arrived
um fewer than half of our students were
making the career changes that they wanted
wanted
um so again they're you know this is a
it's a very high
profile program our students are very
achievement oriented and so they want to
move up they want to move up they want
to go vertical they want to change
industries they want to change
function they want to start companies
they want to make changes
and so it wasn't happening at the pace
and they didn't feel like they were
getting the support
to facilitate that so you know when i
sort of did surveyed them on
you know uh sort of the intake when i
arrived in about 70 percent of them desired
desired
uh career change you know write it right
at the point of entry
um and um what we were offered at the
time was you know the more of the
non-structured one-on-one
approach um to coaching which is what
executive programs are all about what i
was hired to do
my prior background was in executive
search and executive coaching
that's what i did and that's why they
hired me um
but you know it's a very non-structured approach
approach
so a lot of our students were migrating towards
towards
on-campus recruiting along with our
full-time student counterparts
they were just attracted to it and they
a good 30
36 of the population were participating
it but there's a problem there
because we had a very low yield on success
success
so it wasn't the way most of them were
able to get jobs so that was very
disappointing so
this is uh this is the structure
approach that we're looking for
and we're not getting the results what's
going on uh what's going on career team
so i had to address that so what i
thought i'd do is well first of all like
why are they not i sort of intuitively
knew why
but i had to really kind of examine that
so you know why are they not being
successful on campus recruiting well you
know first of all
it's kind of a solo process um
they're targeting three to five year
full-time students our students have
as i just said roughly 12 years of experience
experience
um most of the full-time students have
summer internships that gives them
certainly a leg up with some of these
companies our students
cannot do summer internships they're
employed um
you know there's a lot of our students
are h1 sponsored with visas
um they are they don't have time they
work full-time
um many have you know families and it's
a very rigorous program
so there's not a whole lot of free time
to do you know stuff around case prep
and things like that so they were just
getting outperformed in the interview process
process
there's misalignment with compensation
you know many of them are already making
over 200k
or or in the high in the high ones
we haven't had the international trips
over the last year but on-campus
recruiting season coincides with our
international trips
and um you know less time for the
on-campus recruiting start type of
networking with
that the clubs do and and also at the time
time
they physically would have to go to
philadelphia we're in san francisco they
physically would have to go to philadelphia
philadelphia
so there's just a lot of cards stacked
against them in that process
just wasn't working it was very obvious
why the yield was so low
i had to think of something else um so
what i want to come up with so well
let's think about the factors
so i survey them why are you so
attracted on campus recruiting
if you're not getting the results why
why is this so important to you
well they like the structure can i replicate
replicate
structure sure i can come up with a
program that can replicate the
job search structure um they like the
idea it was a process
right they go into the portal there's
your you've got your resume
your cover letter workshops there's a
system in place
i can jump in and i can die and i know
you know i know what's ahead of me so
could i create a process for them
sure absolutely um there's a timeline it's
it's
it's during the fall i can prepare for
the fall i can do all my prep over the
summer i can network i can go to
information sessions
and then the timelines of fall and then
you start your new job after you
graduate so they like the idea of a
timeline that they could get their head around
around
not some sort of sort of a random
process so could i create
a timeline yes i can um many of them
were in transition
so they saw you know getting into
consulting or banking or things like that
that
representing both a functional and an
industry switch
could i help them help support their transition
transition
outside of the on-campus green process
yes absolutely we could do that
um well top brands hey mckenzie goldman
sachs things like companies like that i
think at the time
you know i think google was you know
some of the some of the tech brands were
also involved in on campus recruiting
back then
uh they don't do it now necessarily but
back then they were doing it so
hey access to these top brands and could
we replicate that
absolutely can now getting into
consulting investment banking
not so much through the job search
action group process however we do have
students that do get into consulting
sort of off cycle
so question mark there but
what i could offer in addition to all
this stuff is group support you're not
going it alone you have a team behind you
you
you have a facilitator coach there you
have your classmates
you have accountability um you know
we're on a schedule we show up to meetings
meetings
where we're checking in with each other
so there's accountability
and there's curriculum that's curriculum
and get into the curriculum i created
around it so to offset these things
we had to create a structure that would
do this and so what that program is
known as
the job search action groups better
known as jsags
and it's become a very popular acronym
that students look forward to in their
second year so i'm gonna kind of break
down what that looks like
so i'm gonna take a second just to kind
of look at chat real quick
okay my bio was posted uh there's uh
obviously we're gonna back load for
questions at the end but i just wanted
to take a little breath here if
or is anyone doing something similar to this
okay okay good we got it here
feel free to type in questions okay
all right so let's break it down into
pieces so what does this structure look like
like
well we work in small groups of eight to
ten students
per group now from us for scaling reasons
reasons
um luckily there's a coach and you're
going to see his name come up because he
he kind of co-wrote our our curriculum
with me i've been working with him for
years i've known him he's
well-known silicon valley coach and so
i've been able to bring him on
um part-time to help facilitate these
these programs so we kind of
kind of trained him on what we're trying
to get and he's been able to do that so
we're able to scale
uh to scale these probes so we rough we
get roughly about 20 students
uh per per session and i'll talk about
what those sessions look like in a
minute but i try to keep it
to eight to ten students when you kind
of exceed ten students then it sort of becomes
becomes
the facilitator lecturing and i want to
get away from that i wanted to be sort of
of
group sharing and at some point i'll
talk about concepts they'll
they'll refer to me but really it's a
lot of a lot of it is the student
supporting one another
um so as i said a group facilitator me
and an
outside coach so i can scale it um
and it's it's targeted on advanced
search so
there's a lot of pre-work involved and
there's a lot of front-end
assessment involved in frank and in fact
i'd be reticent
to to accept people into the group that
haven't already done
a fair amount of one-on-one coaching so targeting
targeting
is very important and a lot of that you
know sort of that preliminary targeting
because it is
more focused on advanced search um
it's very action oriented um it's not lecture
lecture
it's a lot of group support but we're
trying to get students to move from
one level to the next kind of keep them
going through a flow
that you're going to see but it is all
about action how many interviews did you
have this week
how did they go what worked what didn't
work you know how's your sourcing looking
looking
um you know trying to kind of get them
through a process
once they get that first round to really
work as a team to get them to that
second round and um you know so there's
a borderline between
attitude putting too much pressure on
them but there's also you know trying to
get them to move
to the next level and assessing if
they're not looking at the reasons why
they're not
so really focus on results um [Music]
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and um we augmented by one of course
there could
continue to do one-on-one coaching
throughout during the program
and in addition to co having me as their coach
coach
they get this additional coach if you
participate in jc then you get to work
with this other coach to get a different
perspective as well so that's
usually very very helpful and it also
happens about the
about the time they start with their
executive coaching program that we
started in the second year so they're
getting a lot of
so on top of getting you know these
three different coaches they're working with
with
they're also getting the support
structured support from their classmates
and a team
so it really kind of just helps create
this this really positive momentum for them
them
so this is kind of how i package it to
you know opportunity higher impact
structured results
uh orient team approach to cr to uh to
job search
we offered in terms four five and six
which is their entire you know second year
year
well the reason we do it for second
years even though a lot of first years
would want to do this
again going back to what i said earlier
they have to be prepared to be successful
successful
so we want them to spend time in that
first year doing that discovery that due
diligence and figuring out
who they are and what they want to do
next and validating
um their targets the first few sections
you're going to see when i show you
show the roadmap for the program is targeting
targeting
and what i mean by targeting it's
validating not only identifying those targets
targets
what role do i want what types of
companies do i want to work for what is
my long-term career trajectory you know assigning
assigning
you know we actually use data to assign
what is the probability that i'm going
to be successful based on what i'm
bringing to the table
now what gaps do i have so validation
is super important and it also when they
sort of go through that assessment
it might inspire them to look at pivots
that make more sense
i'm going to just i see there's a chat
question what assessments do you use in
the pre-work
that's a really great question so
there's formal assessment we do use
things like career leader of course um
but we actually there's a validation
tool that we have in the job search
manifesto which is our workbook which is
the curriculum we'll talk about
in a second where we sort of assign
values now one could do it it's sort of
a matrix
spreadsheet that i created a long time
ago where you kind of break down
your values what you know what kind of
people do i want to work with you know
what kind of culture am i looking for
what what superpowers and skills do i
want to use
what kind of compensation am i after you
know we kind of break down those categories
categories
and then we sort of as you go through
your discovery process how many of these
things are sort of being validated
so it's sort of a manual assessment we
have in
you know as part of the as part of the
job search manifesto workbook
including you know formal assessments
such as career
leaders such as strength finder we can
factor in
the mbti and sort of package it as such
but um i think a lot the best assessment
is a lot of that front-end networking
that they're doing again what we really
don and i don can confirm that when she
talks dessert talking in a little while
about the value of that whole discovery
and the data they collect from there
so hopefully i answered your question um
you know roughly about 70 percent of the
students that go through the through the
jsac pro that are consistent
find success well still students here
um it um it is uh we have they're about one
one
one and a half hour sessions that we do
and i'll talk about when we schedule them
them
um and we do about eight of those
sessions over the over a 14 that 14 week term
term
we cover categories such as networking
job sourcing strategy brand all the
stuff that you guys talk about that we
talk about
sort of into we start individually we
sort of package this
right and it's it's a great opportunity
we get in the first year these workshops
we give these workshops to them it's a
great opportunity that in the second
year now you're getting a refresher
and it's packaged in a flow and
um you know um what you're seeing is
this advertisement you know that i did
for the
for the for the current class which they
were diverted at the time
the meetings were virtual i think
they're going to stay virtual for a while
while
we're going to see how things play out
with some of the students that we're
bringing back to campus
and whether or not we can do you know
some live virtual mix but right now it's
all virtual
and of course you're working with the
job search manifesto we create
what's app groups uh per cohort where
they share
leads where they post jobs where they
have dialogue hey i've got this
interview coming up
and you know obviously they're gonna you
know say hey can we do set up a mock
interview steve but hey maybe i have
some questions who's worked at these companies
companies
what insights can you give me what leads
can you share so
you know it's just it's a whole package
and then you know some of the uh some of
the remarks that students have made
about the program is they love the
structure you know a lot of
i mean i don't want to stereotype a lot
of the wharton students just they love structure
structure
uh they love process they love data um
the group support has been vital um in
the networking
you know refining that networking pitch
and having your peers review it
linkedin profile which joseph just
talked about to have all of your peers
assess your profile
and your resume and and then to do mock interviews
interviews
um and again refresher of some of the concepts
concepts
concepts we've covered earlier in their
time here
um i'm wondering if you find that
participants stick with it through the
whole summit great question
barbara knows he knows how this works um
i would say i'm going to talk about that
i think about 60
of them i'd say um dawn i don't know if
you want to jump in about your students but
but
a good 60 percent of my students will be
really consistent
um most will you know maybe they won't
go to
all eight sessions they might do five or
six and so
things come up and but what they'll do
is they'll jump into the next round i'll
i'm pretty liberal about letting them if
they did term four
okay well if you for whatever reason had
to miss a lot in term four because of life
life
job what have you um maybe i'll let you
come into term
term five if you're really engaged so
overall i think it's pretty consistent
participation but i would have to say if i'd
i'd
give it a give it a number i'd say about
sixty percent or a really consistent
stay through
you know go through all eight sessions um
um
all right let's move on so let's talk
about process a little bit
when do we meet so our students are in
class fridays and saturdays
um so we generally meet you know we sort
of i i sort of
when we were on campus saturday mornings
at 7 30 was json
so to get them in that mindset we're all
going to meet early spring breakfast
coffee and let's let's bang it out
saturday morning
um obviously that changed with covid so
we were you know on a week night
in in evening schedule probably we'd
start you know 5 30 6 o'clock
after work um so we're going to see how
that goes for now we're still on the weeknights
weeknights
weeks weeknights um but we did also do
saturday mornings depending on
depending on the student needs so i'm
pretty flexible there but we try to meet
on two week intervals
and then if we you know if if a session
runs long
or we didn't cover everything or not
everyone got a turn on on review
we'll throw in an additional section uh
an additional session mid-week
i have to say the virtual strategy
enable a lot of flexibility there
um so it's eight section eight sessions
over the course of the fourteen week term
term
um the workflow is driven by core
competency so you're gonna see the
roadmap in a minute but it sort of
builds off each other right
when you lock in your targets that's
gonna better enable you
to build a strong brand strategy strong
brand strategy is going to enable you to
be a better networker and build out your
network more effectively
building out that network more
effectively is going to lead to better
sourcing quality opportunities
better sourcing you can see where that
goes so it's an idea of a flow
get into that flow and if you haven't
sort of mastered that particular module
you have a team
help you get really comfortable and make
you stronger and then maybe i want
additional coaching so
also participants in the jsac got more
students into my office
though i didn't lack one-on-one requests
but it did get them more into my office
for higher impact meetings
um to solve some of these challenges
that we're having so
it really worked out there as well um
make sessions adjustments based on
student like i said you know we have
sort of an
agenda that we want to cover that week
but if the students were saying hey we
really wanna
i mean there's times when i spent three
sessions on the linkedin profile
because they just really wanted to bang
that out and so what we do is we just
make up for that maybe we'd have a
virtual session midweek to kind of tackle
tackle
resume but maybe they're really
interested in
in spending you know multiple sessions
on the linkedin profile so i'll just go
with the student need we have a basic structure
structure
but i would also kind of meet them where
they needed to be um
each core competent competency would
all right and then of course the
whatsapp groups
uh would help quite a bit for just in
all right well here's the roadmap um so
like i said foundationally we start with
targeting branding and relationship building
building
um so we not as i was saying earlier if
your targets are valid
you build a brand around that around
those targets
you build better quality relationships
amongst our alumni
better enabling you to source
opportunities then how do you sort of tran
tran
transmit all this how do you kind of
draw traffic to you your linkedin profile
profile
syncs very nicely with the resume so now
i've built these core competencies
now we can really get into the tactics
the application
tactic the not just applying for a job
but looking at that job as a case
process what alumni do i know in the
organization what alumni from previous
companies do i know are
in the organization getting them very
comfortable with
with not thinking about just
communicating with recruiters but
communicating with con
decision makers and marketing their
brand of those decision makers and
building relationships with decision
makers and target companies
prior to an open job so they've got the
so they've got the contacts
then we get into practice interviews we
do mocks internally but
one other thing we do during the mocks
is we would bring in you know me and my
uh my the consultant that i bring in a
lot of relationships in silicon valley
with recruiters from top companies
so we have them come in as guests to
mock interview
our students in the jseg and then
finally we'd cap it with probably our most
most
popular program to end it is our salary
negotiation program
which we record and actually use that
for the whole class
on salary negotiation and so
all builds off uh you know one core
competency builds off the other and this
is a lot to that structure where i
talked about earlier the students just
really love
they really love they love the g they
uh timeline you know when is it offered
well they can record
they know it's coming in the second year
we start in term four which is a you
know build up to
right around on campus recruiting season
so it's kind of an alternative to
on-campus recruiting
what we do is if you're going to do
on-campus recruiting so that's a
full-time process in itself that we have
to coach them on
we say do on-campus recruiting and if
that doesn't work out you can jump into
a jane sagan term six
in the spring of your graduation but we
don't want them to really double dip we
want to focus on is two separate processes
processes
um again eight weeks fourteen week
period um
meeting on two week intervals virtual
sessions in between one-on-one coaching
assess process over uh progress over
let's get to switcher so again that was
another factor on that list that i
talked to you about is
you know switchers need that additional support
support
and this provided that most of our
participants in the jsag
you're going to see in a minute i have
some stats you know a lot of our
students are very successful with their
job search individually or just through
one-on-one coaching and individual
enterprise process they're fine with it
they don't necessarily feel the need to
be part of the team
the ones that and they're mostly people
that are sort of moving up vertically
getting looking at that promotion
starting a company what have you most of
the people that would are attracted to
the jsec products are the switchers
i want to change my career function i'm
an engineer i want to get into
you know strategy or product management
i'm in product management
i want to move into m a something like
that um you know people that want to
kind of move
functionally or i want to change
industries i'm in semiconductors and i
want to get into software
i'm in software i want to get you know i
want to get more into fintech things
like that so
this is a nice refuge for our switchers
and why is that so important
because a lot of in switching maybe
there's already
a member of the group that's already in
that space that can kind of help me
through it and kind of guide me
now you would think well they're
classmates so they should be doing this
on their own
but because they're so busy especially
in this virtual world they don't always
get together now
and they have very busy weekends when
they're on campus with academics so they
don't always have time to kind of
come together informally and work on
this stuff this program
created creates a space for that and
they love it
um so industry switch support career
function switch support
and also leadership support so don't
want to knock that
we have a lot of more senior people that
will be in the program
looking at maybe their senior senior
directors or directors looking to move
into the vp level
and they're sort of coaching our middle
managers and so i've seen that i've seen
some people kind of step up as leaders
in the program
that have large teams and when sometimes
the gap
is you know i want to move to the
director level but i just haven't had a
lot of
management experience and you have
people that have had a lot of
dynamic management we'll coach them on
here's how you package what you have
it's not necessarily about headcount
it's responsibilities what you own
and it's just gold when you hear that
coming from student to student not just
me the coach
somebody just sit back and listen to it
it's like magic so it's really awesome
to see them support each other like that
and then in terms of brands
you know we're working with some of the
top brands um
and you know again some of these top
brands are represented in our guest
speakers that we write our guests mock interviewers
