FAQs
What We're Doing is Different.
It's not guest speaking, exclusively mentorship, or a replacement of career services.
It is in-depth instruction and learning of life's most valuable, compounding skills, fka, "soft" skills. It's the answer to the articles, alumni voices, parents, students and others who say "college should do more for life readiness."
But first you need answers to your questions, so here are responses to the ones we get most frequently.
Isn't This What Career Services Does?
Career services does a wonderful job building employer partnerships & helping students master their resumes, LinkedIn and essential workforce knowledge.
Staffed at nearly 1600 students to every career services professional, in-depth skilling of students is not only not feasible, it's unfair to rely solely on career services for this most important work.
Career services builds the employer pipeline, we build the talent to meet those opportunities.
How is this different than our alumni guest speakers?
Guest speakers are fantastic and very much needed to deliver industry, role and certification advice.
They deliver a level of expertise and cache that is necessary for students to see.
Guest speakers share their individual experiences and learnings and can only spend whatever time they have to give in the week(s) leading up to the one-off discussion.
​
Commence brings curated playbooks built over six years compiling and collating 300+ leading resources in each topic, fused with real-world experience & expertise, acting as a continued resource.
Our focus is on the specifics- the Who, What, When, How, Why and Where.
The step-by-step GPS.
We have networking groups and events, how does this differ?
Networking is both an activity and a skill.
For that reason, leveraging a network (event, alumni, etc.) we've separated out and labeled "Harnessing" as you harness the power of an existing force.
But what about when there is no existing force? Or the "force" is hard to reach?
This is Networking as a skill and is what we teach.
Who to reach out to, what to say, how to say it, how to follow up, how to be visible, how to give (back)-- these are all skills we teach.
How Do You Get Students Engaged?
We partner with schools for program communication and incentivization.
We've found giveaways, competitions, professor course credit & extra credit as good participation drivers.
The end goal would be full course credit with a highly selective, application based program to get into the cohort certificate track following the open seminar introducing our unique life bootcamp.
Our Career Services Team Offers a Lot of This, Why Do More?
That's great that Career Services is getting students introduced to many of these important concepts! Putting it simply in the half dozen+ schools we've helped and 500+ students reached, not once did we hear "Our Career Center already covers this."
Investing, Benefits, Tax Strategies, Cold Networking -- These programs are not taught today, and they are ones that have the fundamental power to not only change your students' lives, but your school's alumni giving and student/parent value proposition.
What Our Clients Say
Vicki Wilkins, Career Services, Southwestern Illinois
"... Their program is unlike anything I've ever seen... I highly recommend
Is it a la carte or do we have to offer all 10 courses?
No, you do not need to offer all 10 courses. You can pick which courses you'd like to start with. Our packages begin with 3 courses and our most life-changing courses are Financial Well-Being and Networking, followed by Productivity & Peak Performance, Interview Excellence, Emotional Intelligence, Persuasion & Negotiation.
Is it Only For (Undergrad) Students?
No! While these skills will have the greatest impact on young adults, they are skills everyone benefits from. In fact wherever we've offered recurring programs, faculty, staff and leadership have joined to benefit from the teachings personally.
We encourage all to attend our seminars. After all, the average American scored a 48/100 on financial literacy and over 80% are not health benefits literate. These programs are for everyone's benefit.
Is it Just Seminars or Can We Do More?
We've taught in large auditoriums, small (virtual) cohorts and many things in between.
Our programs include seminars, cohorts (with certifications), book tours, and more.
If you're school is thinking on the cutting edge, we offer something called The Life Accelerator to select schools in the Tri-State area.