Career Success: What Really Matters Webinar
Learn the three pillars of career success in this interactive webinar!
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Event Details
Career Success: What Really Matters?
- Relationship Capital, Strategic Launch, and Intentional Navigation
This 60-minute interactive webinar presents a concise, integrated framework for supporting students from initial launch through later-stage transitions, while reinforcing an entrepreneurial mindset.
The framework begins with relationships, treating them as foundational career capital not merely a networking activity. Participants learn how to convert contacts into relationships that drive career momentum, purposeful engagement, and collaboration.
Building on that foundation, the webinar addresses career launching, where students often struggle to translate interests and strengths into real market opportunities. A four-question model provides a practical structure for aligning identity with roles, skills, organizations, and entry points. Participants apply the model to a case study.
Finally, the session expands to career stages, highlighting what matters most at different points across a working life, helping advisors guide students toward optimal decisions at any stage. Live polling with ensure focus on the work and life stages of greatest interest to participants.
Learning Objectives
- By the end of this webinar, participants will be able to:
Implement relationship-building tactics that help students (and participants) convert contacts into professional relationships, developing the collaboration skills needed to succeed. - Apply the four-question framework to help students rapidly clarify career direction and take strategic action toward launch goals.
- Recognize stage-specific priorities to help students (and advisors) focus on decisions that have the greatest impact on achieving career goals.
Speaker Info:
Marianne Ruggiero
Marianne Ruggiero is the President of Optima Careers which she founded as a boutique career consulting
service after a 25-year career in Human Resources. As a career consultant and executive coach, she offers a
highly customized, proprietary approach to addressing career management, leadership development and
work-life issues. Working one-on-one, she helps clients see their strengths, understand their work style, clarify their goals, align with the marketplace, and create actionable plans that enable them to move forward with
confidence. In executive coaching, clients succeed in driving strategy, establishing more effective
organizational structures, and achieving challenging goals. She is sought out as an advisor for her ability to
balance strategy and execution, values and action, insight and practicality, collaboration and accountability.
She believes in the inherent value of pushing boundaries and achieving excellence while investing in
relationships. Career growth, whether it is about advancement or competence, requires working with
intention and cultivating connections. Her practice is distinguished with a strategic approach that leads to
concrete actions and yields results. Clients often describe their coaching experience as fortifying because
growth is achieved without having to be or act in a way that is inauthentic.
Marianne’s human resources experience included senior positions with prominent companies such as
American Express, Citigroup, and J. Crew. Her executive clients also span a broad spectrum from Goldman
Sachs and Morgan Stanley to iconic brands such as Amazon, Apple, Coca Cola, and Tiffany’s, successful start-ups including Parachute and Kaleidescope, and educational institutions including The City University of New York, Duke University, MIT and Yale.
Marianne has contributed to the Harvard Business Review, appeared on CNN Money with Christine Romans and regularly addresses business and education groups. She has an MBA in Organizational Development from Pace University where she was awarded an Andrew Mellon Foundation fellowship.