Student Leadership and Career Planning for Christian Schools
Our specialized career assessment and leadership development resources inspire students to gain a deep, personal understanding of how and why their vocational choices reflect the brilliance of God’s handiwork and the evidence of His calling in their lives.
Optimize Student Success in a manner that SETS YOUR SCHOOL APART.
Equip students with the foresight of knowing why and how they will experience the greatest fulfillment, purpose and success within a specific mix of career roles, in line with God’s calling in their lives. Doing so in advance of a student’s post-secondary journey is a life-altering game changer in enabling students to discern the Lord’s direction for their futures with greater clarity, forethought and deep personal growth.
Our career and leadership diagnostic consulting process accurately predicts the career and leadership roles in which a student will be most fulfilled and successful. Discover how this opens up career pathways and opportunities beyond the current scope of a student’s experience and foresight.
Discover the full story by navigating through this menu.
For Students
Know why you will experience the most success and fullfilment in a specific mix of careers before you choose a post-secondary route.
Lessen the stressors associated with the post-secondary application process
Set yourself apart from other college/university entrance applicants
Select the most appropriate schools and prospective employers/intern opportunities based on a deep understanding of:
Your best career and leadership pathways
The learning environment in which you will best thrive
Future-proof your career with the soft skills necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing work environment
Develop your leadership skills based on comparative leadership benchmarks that detail your current strengths & best development opportunities
Develop your understanding of how you can best contribute to team performance.
For Parents
Provide parents with deep insight into how and why their teen will best thrive in a specific mix of career types and roles
Help parents see their teens from a fresh perspective, based on the empirical evidence specific to their unique sense of purpose, identity, and value.
Bring clarity to their teen’s journey through college and university, enhanced by the wisdom, discernment and understanding made possible through this assessment and coaching process.
For Your College and University Counselling Team
Support your counseling team with the only predictive analytics capable of:
Predicting a student’s best career options with an 85% probability of success, based on brilliant behavioral research with a database of 10,000 top performers.
Enabling students to know how and why they are best aligned with a unique mix of job roles in which they will thrive.
Suggesting university and college programs specific to a student’s best career pathways.
Providing the evidence-based insights that define, measure and correlate behavioral competencies with career success and fulfillment across a database of 10,000 top performers from every industry sector.
Differentiate each student’s college/university applications with:
Accurate, benchmark data that enhances the student’s profile with highly desired soft skills, inclusive of: problem solving, human relations, motivation, self-efficacy, work habits, vocational incentives, lifestyle preferences, coping strategies and career interest mix.
Enhance your mentoring program by using this career and leadership profile to align each student with the most appropriate mentor.
Create a process for tracking student success in their subsequent post-secondary and career pursuits.
Achieve all of this within the context of engaging the Holy Spirit in working with students to discern how they best engage their God-given giftedness.
For Your Leadership Development & Community Service Teams
Enhance the art of leadership with the proven science of leadership.
Leverage the best evidence-based methodology to define and measure the behavioral competencies required for effective leadership.
Without these soft skills, benchmarked against a diverse group of 10,000 top performers, leadership development will not come close to optimizing a student’s actual potential.
Leadership is a team sport that is built on a core set of behavioral skills. Allow us to demonstrate this to you.
We offer the best and only behavioral assessment consulting process that:
Has empirically defined, measured and predicted the impact of leadership soft skills on leader efficacy.
Defined and measured these soft skills with the granular specificity necessary for you to create exceptional development programs.
Captured sufficient data from a sample group of 10,000 top performers to accurately predict the likelihood of a student’s leadership effectiveness in a diverse range of leadership models.
Optimize student engagement in community service engagements by first assessing their behavioral propensities and strengths across a broad spectrum of community and lifestyle interests.
The Talent Garden team supports your school faculty and students with an exceptional level of commitment, care, expertise and professionalism.
Student wellbeing is reinforced by enabling your faculty to gain insight through this consultative process, revealing the coping strategies and stressors that are unique to each student.
Track the alignment between student progress and their eventual post secondary journey and career journey.
Align the most appropriate mentors with your senior students using this career and leadership report.
Enhance your advancement program by:
Strengthening the bond between students and their independent school experience.
Giving these students a compelling reason to reconnect with your university counselling team to update their career and leadership report as they begin their careers or move on to graduate school.
For Your School’s Senior Leadership Team
Our Services and People
We partner with your university/college counselling team by facilitating a thirty-day career and leadership assessment process that includes the following elements:
Reports provided to school personnel and to students
Student Career Behavioral Dynamics Report
Student Career and Leadership best fit Report
Student mentoring and internship reports
Consultation
Student consultations
Faculty consultations
University counselling consultation
Parental consultation
Mentor consultation
Leadership development consultation
Personal consultations with your faculty advisors, university counselling and wellbeing teams as needed
Availability to joint parent/faculty/advisor meetings.
Long-term Availability:
Sustaining meaningful relationships with your alumni is vital. We provide ongoing support to you with students in the form of a five-year review and reassessment to assist students who are completing their undergraduate programs and considering next steps
Entry to the workforce support is also available through our ongoing support to your university/college counseling, mentoring and/or advancement team.
Barry Pettit, M.Ed.
M.Ed., Ph.D. (TBC), CTDP, Certified SuccessFinder Practitioner
Barry is a graduate of Upper Canada College, including roles in the school’s Board of Stewards, athletics, and theatre arts programs.
Barry began his career as a high school teacher and coach. His entrepreneurial drive prompted him to redirect his career in alignment with two priorities:
The development of two highly valued summer camp programs that have impacted over 40,000 teens over the past forty years. Barry frequently enjoys the blessing of seeing the fruits of this investment expressed in the lives of former campers.
Launching a corporate consulting practice that has provided award-winning strategic planning, marketing, talent development, and organizational development services internationally. IBM, Konica Minolta, Xerox, Glaxo, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, LaFarge, Ledcor, the TDBank, and Morrison Hershfield Engineering, Ontario Telemedicine Network are just a few of the Pettit client roster. Forty-five years of strategic corporate work across every industry vertical are now being poured into our work with high school and university students —a full-circle moment for Barry. The insight, wisdom, and expertise provided by the Talent Garden team are grounded in a lifetime of experience in the corporate, not-for-profit, and public sectors.
When Barry was introduced to the SuccessFinder in 2010, he felt that this career and leadership consulting process offered such life-altering value to teens, adults, and organizations that he shifted his entire focus to incorporating the SuccessFinder into his passion for corporate performance, employee impact, and youth/young adult development.
Jan Sullivan, B.Sc.
Jan Sullivan has over thirty-five years of experience in independent school education with a specific focus on student growth and development. Schools that engage students in both school-life activities inside and outside the classroom are setting them on a pathway to contribute to making the world a better place. Jan has held a number of different roles at Bishop Strachan, including teacher, Department Head, Principal of the Summer Academy, Director of Admissions, and Vice Principal, Student Life at the Bishop Strachan School in Toronto.
Her expertise in maximizing student achievement was useful as she participated in numerous School Accreditation teams with the Canadian Accredited Independent Schools (CAIS), providing critical feedback to encourage Independent School leaders to refine programming to best meet the needs of their student body. Jan views the SuccessFinder process as an invaluable resource for school leaders to better understand their students and provide the essential, data-driven guidance necessary to effectively launch students into their post-secondary programs and careers.