A HEAD OF CAREERS RECENTLY SAID:
"Most careers sessions are either too vague to be useful or so prescriptive students tune out. We need someone who can actually engage them and give them tools they'll use after the session ends."
That's what I do.
Most careers practitioners tell students what to think about. These sessions ask them questions they haven't been asked before.
They write. They think. They find something specific.
By the end of a session, a student has language for something true about themselves that they couldn't have named when they walked in. That language goes into their personal statement, their interview answer, their university application, their first job pitch.
This is what sessions at Redlands School, Pymble Ladies' College, Emanuel School, The Illawarra Grammar School, and five years as Head of Careers at Newington College are built around.
WHO YOU ARE (WHEN NOBODY'S WATCHING)
Identity, strengths, values, and career direction work for Years 10-12.
Students arrive at careers sessions knowing they're supposed to figure something out. Most sessions give them a framework and send them home. These sessions give them a question they haven't been asked before, then another, then another, until something lands that actually belongs to them.
The work surfaces what students are already doing, already noticing, already being called on for, whether anyone has named it or not. Strengths they've built outside the classroom. Patterns they've never connected to a career direction. Capabilities that belong on a university application but have never made it onto one.
Sessions in this pathway include:
Who You Are When Nobody's Watching: the flagship session, built around private reflection and specific moments from a student's own life. Available as a single session or multi-session series.
What Do You Want to Be: works backwards from identity to pathway, so students choose a direction rather than guess at one.
Strengths, Values, and Personal Pitch: students leave with a specific sentence about themselves they can use immediately.
Goal setting and action planning: built around decisions students need to make now.
CV, resume, and personal statement development: utilising AI and grounded in real moments, not generic claims.
ATAR literacy and university pathway planning: practical and specific for Years 11 and 12.
1-on-1 careers consulting: individual sessions for students who need dedicated guidance.
My full "Designing Your Career, Creating Your Future" programme runs across four cumulative sessions covering career vision, identity work, strengths articulation, and action planning. It builds progressively and adapts to your timetable.
WHERE YOU'RE GOING
International university applications: US, UK, EU, and Asia.
Most school counsellors manage international applications alongside a full domestic caseload. These sessions are built by someone whose entire focus is international pathways.
Students applying to universities in the US, UK, Europe, or Asia are navigating systems that work differently from each other and differently again from the Australian domestic process. The Common App is not UCAS. A US personal essay is not a UK personal statement. An Asian university application has different requirements again. Getting the system wrong wastes the application.
These sessions cover what each system actually requires, where Australian students consistently make avoidable mistakes, and how to build an application that works for the specific institutions on a student's list.
Sessions include university system orientation for US, UK, EU, and Asian institutions, personal statement and college essay development, interview preparation, scholarship application support, and school holiday intensive sessions for students with imminent deadlines.
Available as single sessions, small group workshops, or individual consulting. School holiday intensives available for students with time-sensitive applications.
BACKGROUND
Twenty years in education. Fifteen teaching English and Film. Five as Head of Careers at Newington College. Now running leadership and career development programmes in the corporate sector through StoryShift Collective, including work with Microsoft's graduate programme in Amsterdam.
Whether the session is identity work with a Year 10 cohort or a school holiday intensive with a Year 12 student whose Common App deadline is six weeks away, the approach is the same. Specific questions. Real answers. Language students can actually use.
LET'S TALK ABOUT YOUR PROGRAMME:
Whether you need someone for a careers day, a leadership programme, a wellbeing week, or a semester-long series, let's chat.
I also run professional development programmes for teachers and school leaders. Learn more here.
Student Careers Programmes