Private School Student Career Planning

Optimize Student Success in a manner that SETS YOUR SCHOOL APART.

The foreknowledge of understanding how and why a student will experience the greatest purpose, fulfillment and success in a specific mix of career and leadership roles is life changing for students, faculty and parents alike.

Our career and leadership diagnostic and consulting process accurately predict the career and leadership roles in which a student will be most fulfilled and successful.

Discover the full story by navigating  through this menu.

For Students

  1. Know why you will experience the most success and fullfilment in a specific mix of careers before you choose a post-secondary route.

  2. Lessen the stressors associated with the post-secondary application process

  3. Set yourself apart from other college/university entrance applicants

  4. 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

  5. Future-proof your career with the soft skills necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing work environment

  6. Develop your leadership skills based on comparative leadership benchmarks that detail your current strengths & best development opportunities

  7. 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 Counseling 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-centric data that highlights 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.

For Your Leadership Development & Community Service Teams

  • Leverage the only evidence-based method capable of defining and measuring 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.

  • 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 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 yoru 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 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. 

Vice President, Independent School Programs

First-Hand Experience from Upper Canada College

Assistant Head of the Upper School - Student Life and Leadership, Upper Canada College

Andrew MacDougall

Chisom Ochuba

Graduate, Lang Scholars Program and Head Stewart, Upper Canada College

At first, the SuccessFinder results felt overwhelming, but having Mr. Pettit and The Talent Garden walk me through them step-by-step was incredibly helpful. They made the insights easy to understand and apply. The assessment helped me put words to things I’ve always felt but couldn’t quite articulate, and gave me real clarity about my strengths, weaknesses, and the types of careers and environments I’m best suited for. I’ve done other personality assessments before, but none felt as deep or accurate. I revisit my results at least once a month—they remind me to lean into environments where I can thrive, and to keep working on areas that need growth. In a world where knowing yourself is more important than ever, the SuccessFinder has been a game-changer. I recommend it to anyone serious about personal and professional development.