Career Webinars
Get expert guidance on skill building, job search strategies, and more through a free webinar series from the Michigan Alumni Career program.
Join our webinar series to learn about a variety of career topics led by alumni, industry experts, and coaches. Missed a webinar? Check out our archive to watch full recordings of past sessions and Career Bites featuring key takeaways in short clips.
Upcoming Webinars
Beyond Balance: Practical Tools for Career-Driven Caregivers
Advancing your career while caring for loved ones requires practical tools — not perfect balance. Executive coaches Christina Zini, ’95, and Carla Greenan help working caregivers build sustainable strategies for thriving at work and at home.
Reconnect with your “why” and reframe common caregiving narratives. Explore boundary-setting, expectation management, and practical approaches for navigating professional and personal responsibilities. Through live “laser coaching” demonstrations that address real participant challenges, you will see these tools in action and learn conversation frameworks you can apply immediately.
Leave with resources, community connections, and clarity on next steps for your unique caregiving journey.
Christina Zini, ’95
Christina Zini, ’95, is a leadership and executive coach with more than 25 years of global experience coaching and developing individuals and driving transformational change. She built a successful career as a management consultant with PwC and IBM Consulting before transitioning into professional development within IBM.
Driven by her passion for helping people, particularly women, advance their careers and elevate their leadership led her to launch her own coaching and consulting practice more than a decade ago. She works with clients around the world, facilitates workshops and team coaching sessions, and is a frequent podcast guest.
A mother of three, Christina spends most of her non-working hours behind the wheel of the soccer carpool and on the sidelines of her sons’ games. She is a proud Michigan alumna and a native Yooper who spends summers in her hometown of Marquette.
Carla Greenan
Carla Greenan is a former CPA turned executive coach with a passion for guiding working parents through the trials and tribulations of the work/home juggle. Before starting her own business in 2016, she spent 24 years at EY, where she held roles in audit and human resources and served as a founding member of the executive coaching team.
Carla has coached extensively in the professional services environment at all levels. Her expertise includes supporting working parents, advancing women in the workplace, and navigating leadership transitions. She has worked with working parents, new partners, direct-admit partners, and both established and emerging leaders.
Outside of work, Carla stays busy managing the activities of her three teenagers and fits in self-care while walking her two dogs.
Navigating the Quarterlife Career Crisis: Real Stress, Real Solutions
This workshop will empower Gen Z alumni and their supporters with a practical framework for navigating the quarter-life career crisis, a period marked by uncertainty, pressure, and unrealistic expectations. Attendees will gain insight into the real drivers of early career stress while reframing the 20s as a time for exploration rather than perfection. The session also provides networking tools, a career strategy guide, and wellness practices to reduce anxiety, build clarity, and take confident next steps in an evolving career journey.
Bonus: Don’t miss your chance to win a free one-hour coaching session with Scott. Join live and stay through the end to be eligible. Open to U‑M alumni only.
Scott Doyne, ’96, is an ICF-certified coach and bestselling author who helps people turn career anxiety into clarity. A former award-winning Turner Sports executive, he’s delivered more than 1,800 coaching sessions and helped clients land roles at Amazon, Disney, and the NFL. He’s a renowned speaker, frequent podcast guest, and author of the Career Transition Series, including his new release, “Navigating the Quarterlife Career Crisis.” Scott lives in Atlanta with his family.
Exploring the Midlife Career Crisis
Midcareer can bring a collision of success, stagnation, and shifting priorities, often labeled a “midlife career crisis.” In this interactive webinar, participants will use Scott Doyne’s four stages of career transition — Realize, Explore, Articulate, Activate — to turn uncertainty into a structured reset. Each stage includes practical exercises and reflection so attendees leave with tangible outputs, not just ideas.
Participants will be equipped to:
- Realize: Pinpoint key drivers of dissatisfaction and define what must change.
- Explore: Generate and prioritize realistic pathways and low-risk “test” options.
- Articulate: Craft a clear midcareer story for networking and interviews.
- Activate: Build a 30-60-day action plan with next steps, accountability, and resources.
Bonus: Don’t miss your chance to win a free one-hour coaching session with Scott. Join live and stay through the end to be eligible. Open to U‑M alumni only.
Scott Doyne, ’96, is an ICF-certified coach and bestselling author who helps people turn career anxiety into clarity. A former award-winning Turner Sports executive, he’s delivered more than 1,800 coaching sessions and helped clients land roles at Amazon, Disney, and the NFL. He’s a renowned speaker, frequent podcast guest, and author of the Career Transition Series, including his new release, “Navigating the Quarterlife Career Crisis.” Scott lives in Atlanta with his family.
Navigating the Third Act: Retiring with Confidence and Purpose
Retirement today is less a finish line than a transition into a “third act” of life and work. This webinar explores how to step away from a primary career with confidence, identity clarity, and a sense of purpose. We will discuss common emotional and practical challenges — including shifting routines, relationships, and meaning — and strategies for designing what comes next.
Together, we will:
- Identify key nonfinancial questions to answer before retiring: purpose, structure, community, health, and identity.
- Assess readiness for change and anticipate common transition pitfalls.
- Create a simple “third act” plan with near-term experiments: volunteering, part-time work, learning, caregiving, and entrepreneurship.
- Develop language to communicate your transition goals with family, colleagues, and mentors.
Dr. Laura Lamps has worked as a practicing pathologist, educator, researcher, and administrative leader for more than 25 years, both at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the University of Michigan. She has served in leadership positions on several nonprofit boards, including the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology and the Central Arkansas Rescue Effort for Animals. She is also an internationally known author and speaker, and she lectures widely on mentoring, time management, and career development. She serves as an executive and leadership coach through the Michigan Medicine Office of Faculty Affairs, with a particular interest in navigating career transitions.
When Your Team Keeps Getting Stuck: Working With Tension, Conflict, and Challenging Dynamics
The pace of work and the pressure to deliver create just the right conditions for tension to build in teams. You may leave interactions feeling frustrated, wondering why your team keeps having the same conversations, avoids the hard ones, or allows small issues to escalate into major misunderstandings.
If only other people would pull themselves together, everything would go smoothly, right?
Here’s something you may not realize: your communication style may be unintentionally contributing to the very dynamics that frustrate you.
In this session, you will learn how to spot the patterns underneath your team’s stuck conversations — and what to do about them. We will explore the four modes of communication that show up in every conversation, how missing actions create conflict, and the five common stuck patterns that play out in teams every day.
You will leave with a practical framework you can use immediately — in your next meeting, your next hard conversation, or your next moment of “here we go again.”
What you will learn:
- How to shift the role you might be playing in your team’s stuck patterns
- How to spot the communication patterns that keep your team going in circles
- The four modes of communication present in every conversation, and what happens when one goes missing
- The five most common stuck patterns that show up in teams
- Practical moves you can make to change the conversation in real time
Marsha Acker is an executive coach, speaker, and three-time author who helps scaling founders and leadership teams break through the conversations they’re stuck in — and the ones they keep avoiding.
Acker is the co-founder and CEO of Elevate Dialogue, the founder of TeamCatapult, and author of “Staying In It: How Great Leaders Transform Tension into Trust, Speed, and Scalable Success.” She has spent nearly two decades sitting in rooms with executive and leadership teams, watching brilliant people get stuck in the same conversations week after week. She’s heard the same frustrations more times than she can count: “Why do we keep having the same conversations?” “Decisions take forever.” “I feel like I’m the only one moving us forward.”
What she’s learned is that these teams don’t have execution problems; they have conversation problems. Her work is grounded in one belief: When teams learn to really talk to each other, not just at each other, decisions get faster, people lean in, and leaders get to lead instead of referee.
She is the host of the “Defining Moments of Leadership” podcast and is known internationally for helping leaders see the invisible dynamics that shape their teams’ performance — and change them.