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Focus Forward: Career Transition Coaching

Focus Forward is an integrated program exclusively and thoughtfully designed for working professionals looking to make a later career transition. Join others just like you—later career professionals looking for a new direction—to navigate the next steps and create an action plan.

Why Focus Forward?

As you know in both business and life, it’s not just about asking questions, but asking the right questions. Do I want to shift careers? Do I want to continue in my current career? Do I want to start making strides toward retirement? This program helps you ask the relevant questions and determine the best course of action through new frameworks, tools, and strategies that will help you map out the future you desire.

Curriculum

Start with the prerequisite Planning for Change workshop, and then select from two courses: Revitalizing Career or Reinventing Retirement. Can’t decide which to take? Complete both! Short courses, such as Healthy Aging and Expanding Community, are also offered during select terms.

Prerequisite Course

All Focus Forward participants will begin with the prerequisite course to start stimulating your thinking about later career transition.

Planning for Change Workshop

This workshop is designed around The Hudson Institute’s core model known as Cycle of Renewal™, a powerful learning tool for individuals navigating transition and change. Begin with an exploration of later career transition, then learn a model for navigating change and transition for lifelong renewal.

What You'll Take Away
  • Learn 10 important considerations for a successful later career transition
  • Gain valuable life skills for sustaining purpose and passion
  • Develop a plan for change and moving forward

Concentration

Choose from two additional courses that explore viable options for moving forward with you and your individual needs taking center stage. You can also opt to take both!

Revitalizing Career

Explore whether and how to stay in your current career or transition to a new one. Among other important discoveries, you will identify how your talents, skills, and experiences can be leveraged into new opportunities. Ideal for working career professionals who plan to continue working over the next decade and want to revitalize or change careers.

What You'll Take Away
  • Develop a framework, a process, and resources to proactively manage your career and work life
  • Gain strategies for actively managing career satisfaction and renewal
  • Learn about new ways of working, encore careers, and portfolio careers
Reinventing Retirement

This course is ideal if you want to shift your focus away from a full-time career to a new chapter that may or may not include “work” of some form. Be introduced to new ways of thinking about retirement, from meaningful new forms of work to community engagement to lifelong learning. Suited for working career professionals who plan to retire in the next one to five years.

What You'll Take Away
  • Build on your sense of purpose and passions
  • Explore new roles and potential outlets for your experiences, skills, and passions
  • Identify options and resources for lifelong learning and renewal

Additional Offerings

Expanding Community

This short course is available to all students who have taken Planning for Change. Discuss how relationships change and the potential of having a strong sense of community.

What You'll Take Away
  • Explore what community means to you
  • Discuss ways of expanding your social community
  • Consider related action steps to take
Healthy Aging: Physical, Mental and Social Wellbeing

This short course is available to all students who have taken Planning for Change. Examine these three aspects of healthy aging and how they combine to create a foundation for healthy aging.

What You'll Take Away
  • Become aware of the importance of mental health and the health of our brains as we age
  • Explore what neuroscience can tell us about our aging brains
  • Learn ways to build social muscle as the third aspect of healthy aging

Meet the Instructor

Lori Zahn, president of Perceptive Leaders LLC, a leadership development consulting company, is an executive coach working with organizational leaders and career professionals. Educated in adult development and learning, and drawing on years of experience working in corporate environments—both as a senior level leader in Fortune 100 companies and as a consultant to senior level organizational leadership—Lori brings her passion for working with professionals to create fulfilling next chapters.

For more information, please contact lzahn@perceptiveleaders.com or call 303-730-3041

Hear from Our Students

Students in Focus Forward value the collaborative community found in the classes, along with the outstanding quality of instruction provided by lead instructor Lori Zahn. Hear what our students have to say…

Jenette Smith

“Lori Zahn provides a passionate, caring, and very skilled, educated, and experienced approach to Focus Forward. Her wonderful teaching style, experience level, and genuine passion for her work will not only guide and enlighten you, she will inspire you.”

Nancy Greager

“Planning for Change lit me up so much I signed up for the Revitalizing Career course. It’s equally mind-blowing. I just can’t say enough good things about Lori Zahn and the Focus Forward Program. My only complaint is that I wish the program was longer.”

Jeff Groat

“The class provided valuable insight for personal change, renewed direction, and the tools to achieve the goals I set during the course. “

Enrichment Program

The Enrichment Program connects the intellectually curious adult to DU’s outstanding faculty, facilities, and programming, and Denver’s rich cultural community through non-credit courses. With adult education offered via short evening and weekend classes, you can explore a wide range of subjects: from history and contemporary issues to science, literature, and the arts—without the pressures of exams, grades, or admission requirements.

ENRICHMENT PROGRAM

Contact Information

Program Contact
Lori Zahn