WEBINAR COLLECTION

Living Wages and Career Development: Supporting Clients Amid BC’s Affordability Crisis  

With the 2024 living wage in Metro Vancouver rising to $27.05 per hour, many workers are struggling to keep up with the soaring costs of housing, food, and other essentials. Compounding this challenge are the economic headwinds facing BC.

This webinar, led by economist Iglika Ivanova, will unpack the latest living wage data and labour market trends, and what they mean for career development practitioners. Learn how the rising cost of living, precarious employment, and broader economic shifts impact your clients’ career choices, financial stability, and overall well-being. Gain insights into the role of living wages in fostering sustainable career paths and explore strategies to support clients build more resilient careers in an uncertain economic landscape.  

Presented by Iglika Ivanova

Unleashing Potential: Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs in Career Transitions 

This session equips career development professionals with strategies to help clients overcome limiting beliefs during career transitions. Attendees will explore practical tools to address self-doubt, reframe negative thoughts, and build resilience, enabling clients to view job changes and workforce re-entry as opportunities for growth and success. 

Career transitions often bring uncertainty, self-doubt, and fear of the unknown. This session offers career development professionals actionable insights to empower clients in overcoming limiting beliefs such as imposter syndrome, fear of failure, and doubts about skill relevance. By exploring cognitive-behavioral techniques and resilience-building strategies, participants will gain the tools to support clients in reframing negative thoughts and fostering a growth mindset.

The session will provide practical approaches, including cognitive restructuring, goal-setting frameworks, and visualization exercises, designed to help clients navigate job changes, industry shifts, or re-entry into the workforce. Participants will also learn to integrate these tools into coaching practices to build clients' confidence and equip them to take actionable steps toward their goals.

Presented by Dr.  Stacy Heimburger 

The Power of Metaphor in Navigating Career Transitions 

Metaphors are memorable. Stories stick with us. They bring clarity as we navigate career and life transitions. In today's world of sensory and information overload, simple, clear, relatable metaphors are helping people to make sense of complexity, make decisions that fit their needs, and paddle forward with energy and engagement. 

In this customized engagement designed for BCCDA, Cristine Saxon, internationally celebrated executive leadership coach and author of Paddle Your Own Boat, will share three original metaphors she designed and integrates into her coaching practice with CEOs, leaders, students, job seekers, entrepreneurs and anyone who wants to thrive.

How can you skillfully incorporate simple, relatable stories and metaphors into your practice, adapt them to people's diverse needs and, in doing so, enhance their well-being, resilience and results? Let's find out together. 

Presented by Cristine Saxon 

Increasing client's career resilience through logotherapy and meaning-based coaching 

Researchers have established a close relationship between the ability to recover, adapt, and transform in the face of job loss and long-term career success. 

Today’s labour market's fast-changing, increasingly uncertain, and complex characteristics often make job seekers feel like prisoners in a senseless, hostile world, with no control over their lives. This session will introduce Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, a therapy that asserts that people can accept suffering as part of life and, instead of losing hope, they can turn it into accomplishments. 

Participants will learn how to apply logotherapeutic principles when coaching clients to overcome their career challenges.  They will walk away with tools to increase their clients’ resilience, thereby increasing their success outcomes in the long term. 

Presented by Michaela Fengstad 

Behind the Scenes of Job Search Process and Career Development   

Job search and career development are not one-time events but ongoing processes that evolve throughout your professional life. In this session, we’ll take a "behind the scenes" (BTS) approach to job searching, showing participants how to stay prepared, strategic, and proactive throughout their careers. 

We’ll cover personal branding, networking, journaling for career reflection, and why job searching should be treated as career "insurance." The session will also provide strategies to handle difficult periods, including economic downturns or long-term unemployment, to ensure resilience and long-term success. 

Presented by Sue Switzers

Strategic Job Search: Customizing Resumes    

This session is designed to equip career development practitioners with advanced strategies for helping clients create highly customized resumes that stand out in today’s competitive job market. Attendees will explore the importance of tailoring resumes for specific roles by aligning skills, experiences, and keywords with job descriptions. 

The session will also cover best practices for optimizing resumes for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to ensure they are both personalized and technology-friendly. Interactive discussions and practical demonstrations will provide actionable insights that practitioners can immediately apply when working with job seekers. 

Learning objectives include how to customize resumes to match specific job descriptions, optimize resumes for ATS, and align skills and experience with job requirements. The primary audience includes career development practitioners, job developers, job seekers, career coaches, and HR professionals, while the secondary audience includes case managers and vocational rehabilitation specialists. 

Presented by Anoop Atluri

Three critical mistakes that keep applicants from getting the job they love 

In 2025, the largest generation globally is between 13 and 28 years of age, better known as Gen Z. Without a doubt, Gen Z is shaking up the workplace. In fact, ResumeBuilder.com surveyed 1,344 managers and business leaders and found that 74% believe Gen Z is more difficult to work with than other generations (2023).

In this seminar, we will unveil some of Gen Z's challenges and how they affect the workplace. We will also discuss how to fix these "problems" to help this generation adjust to the workplace with reassurance, confidence, and less stress. We aim to help everybody "win." 

Presented by JoAnne Marlow

Building Career Practitioner Capacity through Collaboration and ‘Train the Trainer’ Approach: A Case Study 

As career practitioners, we must seize all opportunities for professional development whether they are available on-the-job, through formal channels and/or by learning from our colleagues in the field.  

This presentation shares a story of Progressive Intercultural Community Services (PICS) and Vancouver Community College (VCC) working together on the ESDC funded Intercultural Skills for Success project to leverage each other’s strengths and to build practitioners capacity using Train the Trainer approach embedded in the experiential learning pedagogy.  

The audience will gain insight into challenges and best practices of “Train the Trainer” model and how the model enables a sustainable transfer of knowledge and skills from trainers working in an academic setting to practitioners in a community services environment. 

Train the Trainer model’s impact is multifold on the clients, facilitators, case managers, employment coaches, and the learning culture of the community organizations as it enhances the depth of the training and creates more motivated, confident and skilled employees of the community organizations.  

Presented by Pam Khinda, M.Ed. CCDP  + Sugandh Saurabh 

Pam Khinda, M.Ed. CCDP  is a manager and instructor with 20+ years of combined experience in project management, teaching, coordination, and career development.  At VCC, she develops, implements, manages and coordinates innovative and accessible partnership-based workforce development solutions that prepare underserved and marginalized community members for sustainable employment/career opportunities.  

At SFU’s Continuing Studies, she has been teaching as a term-instructor in the Career Development Practitioner Certificate program since 2010.  She has an MEd in Curriculum and Instruction: Post-Secondary from SFU, Provincial Instructor’s Diploma (PID), and Certificate in Online/eLearning Instruction from VCC. Additionally, she is a BCCDA-certified Career Development Practitioner (CCDP). Pam enjoys biking, hiking, reading investigative thrillers and gardening. 

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The Rise of Portfolio Careers: Revolutionizing Career Development Practices for Today's Workforce  

The workforce is changing, and so too must the ways that we prepare for it. Many people entering the labour market today will either be required to (or will strive for!) a portfolio career, which demands a dynamic approach to one’s working life. 

Instead of holding a single, full-time position, portfolio careerists will juggle part-time work, freelance projects, or entrepreneurial pursuits. While many embrace this style of work willingly, drawn to the greater flexibility, variety, and autonomy it can afford, it’s not without drawbacks. Uncertainty about one’s career progression is common for those in more highly unpredictable portfolio careers, making long-term career planning more challenging.  

This is especially true because much of how we continue to think about career development remains rooted in traditional career paths and planning. While suitable for many, this approach fails to adequately prepare people for the realities of today’s rapidly growing gig economy (characterized by short-term, contracted, flexible roles), where most portfolio careerists find themselves.  

This workshop will dive into the unique realities of portfolio careers within the gig economy, exploring strategies for how to prepare for as well as navigate this evolving world of work with confidence and clarity.   

Presented by Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett, Ph.D., R.Psych + April Dyrda, M.Sc., R.Psych

Dr. Laura Hambley Lovett is an Organizational Psychologist, Keynote Speaker, Business Leader, Author, and Podcast Host. She is a sought-after thought leader on workplace psychology and career development internationally, with nearly 25 years of experience. Dr. Laura is an entrepreneur who understands the intersection of business and people.  

Dr. Laura’s areas of expertise include leadership, team, and culture development in organizations, remote/hybrid workplace success, and mental health/developing resiliency through turbulent times. She has facilitated, assessed, and coached 100s of leaders and teams across industries.  She holds a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Calgary, where she is currently an Adjunct Professor.   

As a passionate entrepreneur, Dr. Laura has founded several psychology practices in Canada since 2009, including Canada Career Counselling, Work EvOHlution, The Leadership Success Group and Synthesis Psychology.  She runs the widely followed podcast Where Work Meets LifeTM, where she interviews global experts on a variety of topics around wellness, career, and organizational culture.  

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