I was drawn to the work of Patricia Keener because of its intersections with my own. Although her practice is wider than mine, career coaching is part of it. I’m so pleased to present this Q&A with Patricia. The Q&A will run over the next several days.
Bio: Patricia Keener is a training consultant and coach whose focus is on 
organisational communication, presentations, professional development, and cross-cultural adaptation. For the past 19 years, she has worked with international businesses using training, workshop and coaching techniques to help her clients develop their interpersonal skills, improve their business effectiveness, understand cultural differences, and become better at giving presentations.
Her work has also included development of training strategies and programmes for industries including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, financial services, FMCG, government organisations and management consultancy. In her career coaching practice, she works with a variety of clients including senior-level executives, middle managers, and MBA and graduate students
Patricia is an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and a member of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research UK and the Association for Career Professionals International. She both a coaching and career coaching qualification and is a certified NLP Practitioner. Pat is licensed to use Argonaut, an on-line cross cultural assessment tool and CareerStorm navigator, an online careers assessment.
For more information visit her Website, Keener Inspiration.
Q&A with Patricia Keener, Question 1:
Q: You and I share an interest in storytelling for career development. To what extent and in what ways do you integrate story into your work with job-seekers?
A: A lot of my career work is with international people looking for work in the UK. They may be overseas students who are finishing a graduate or MBA programme here, or other Europeans coming to work in the UK, or partners of employees who are here on an international assignment and wish to continue their own career progression. I have found that particularly with this group, using stories throughout their job-searching process was a very effective way to address such issues as: differences in culture, language challenges and often gaps in their CV from a global lifestyle.
I run a workshop called “Using Storytelling for an Effective Interview” that is designed to give the participants a clear idea of why stories are an effective way of demonstrating what they have to offer, how to find the stories they can use and then what they can do to prepare and polish them. The most important thing at interview is to be as authentic as possible in, let’s face it, a stressful environment. Instead of asking clients to rigidly adhere to practised answers for interview questions I ask them to create different stories they could share that would demonstrate their competencies. It helps to take the pressure off and create a more comfortable atmosphere. After being on the other side of the table, interviewing a series of candidates two years ago, I really began to appreciate the ones who could be interesting and engage me with stories rather than blandly answer my questions with facts. I’ve also used stories as a basis for creating compelling elevator pitches, cover letters, and backing up personal-branding statements.
With the experienced executive clients I work with who want to make career changes or who have been made redundant, it is often tempting for them to jump right into the job seeking process. They want to get their CV together and send it out before taking time to do some self-reflection on just what it is that make them a unique candidate to a perspective employer. Some people can be put off by doing “touchy feely coaching exercises,” but if you explain that they are creating their career narrative, suddenly it seems a lot easier to convince them to do it.