Cincy chamber leads the way with development programs
It’s time to dust off your resume, add some new skills and enhance your career trajectory with Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber’s Leadership Center.
Sean Comer, vice president of the Leadership Center, says the center offers a full suite of professional development and leadership development programs that are open to people at any stage of their career.
“We build targeted programs that are developed for people in their early career stage or at the tail-end senior executives to help people develop professionally but also to get more ingrained in this community,” Comer says.
Programs like Leadership Cincinnati, which have been around for almost 50 years, is a civic learning program for established leaders—C-suite or senior executives—to help them learn about the region’s assets and challenges, plus expand their network.
“We know that people who stick around in a city like Cincinnati, they do it partly because it’s a place that they call home because they have a job or it’s where their family is from,” Comer says. “But they also do it because they care about the issues that are here and the wonderful assets that are here. [Leadership Cincinnati] tries to help people better understand what we have and where they might dig in.”
The Leadership Center also hosts other programs that are tailored to the specific needs of people in their careers. WE Lead is a professional development program that uses executive coaching to prepare and empower executive-level women to move into higher leadership roles. C-Change is a program that combines leadership development with community engagement to deepen connections to the Cincinnati region.
What sets the Leadership Center’s programs apart from traditional leadership development is the added touch of community, Comer says.
“All these jobs, all these people, they’re embedded here in Cincinnati. Part of what’s going to ensure we attract and retain talent is people seeing and understanding the big city assets that are here in Cincinnati,” he says. “Our programs don’t exist in a vacuum where you can take the skills you learned here and then be just as good anywhere else. Certainly, you learn things here that you can take with you to any other community you go to, but we try to embed them in the experiences of Cincinnati because we think it’ll make people in Cincinnati better leaders.”