Mount Pleasant Magazine 6.3

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| | 10 - WIB
Getting Ready
toWork
The Center For
Women’s R4W Program
Getting
a job is about
more than
just sending
out resumes;
it’s about
having the
skills, vision and confidence to make
it happen. The Center for Women
focuses on these aspects of the job
hunt in
its free
six-week course – Ready for Work
(R4W). The program starts regularly
throughout the year and helps women
prepare to enter or re-enter the
workforce by giving them the “soft”
skills they need to pursue the career
they want.
R4W, which started as a pilot
program in July 2014, was created to
help a wide variety of women, said
Leigh Ann Garrett, program and events
manager at the Center for Women.
“We’ve worked with female
veterans. We’ve worked with
domestic survivors. We’ve had
women participate who have master’s
degrees,” she said.
No matter how different women
appear on the outside, the objective is
the same: To help them identify and
achieve their goals.
The Center for Women partners
with local organizations to work with a
group of women with similar interests
or challenges, such as teens or women
over 50, and the course content is
tweaked to address each group’s unique
challenges. The program wouldn’t run
without dedicated volunteers, experts
in fields such as human relations and
career development, who give their
time and knowledge.
Though the time commitment is
very manageable – two hours, one day
per week, for six weeks – the women
get a lot done in that time, including
preparing resumes, doing mock
interviews, filling out applications and
choosing appropriate interview outfits.
But R4W goes far beyond that.
“There are other places you can get
your resumes reviewed, but it starts
and ends there,” said Garrett.
In the R4W program, women also
learn about the power of nonverbal
communication and first impressions,
personal goals, how to overcome fears
and how to build confidence.
Diane Sancho, who went through
the program in late 2015, was happy
to discover that it went beyond simply
helping women find a job.
“It was more introspective,” she
explained. “We identified strengths
and weaknesses and how we would
describe ourselves. We focused on
what we want people to know about
us – what we’re proud of.”
Sancho, who has her master’s in
Social Work and had been out of the
workforce for a year after 30 years in
administrative positions, credits the
program for helping her discover what
she truly wanted to do.
What she wanted, she realized, was
to be an entrepreneur. Sancho now
By ErIn DanLy
2700 North Hwy 17
Mount Pleasant, SC 29466
(843) 606-2715
Monday- ursday 10-6
Friday-Saturday 10-5
Remember, it
doesn’t have
to be new
to be awesome!