Abigail Green, Nov 1
Do you want your work to make more of an impact? Are you looking to increase your salary? Do you need more work-life balance? Are you wondering what your career might look like a decade from now? In the past, you might have wondered if you would have to leave Johns Hopkins to find those answers. Not anymore, thanks to the new Center for Staff Life Design and its inaugural director, Patrick Brugh. His job is to help you design your best life.
Created specifically for the university’s 12,000-plus staff members, the Center for Staff Life Design builds on the success of the Life Design Lab, launched in 2018 at Homewood to serve the Krieger and Whiting schools’ students and alumni. Unlike the Life Design Lab, the CSLD has no physical location—yet—but that’s by design. “We’re not asking people to come to us unless that’s what they want to do,” Brugh says. “We are going to be traveling to the staff and meet them where they are.”
A formal kickoff event to introduce the Center for Staff Life Design will be held from 2:30 to 5 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 14, in Shriver Hall on the Homewood campus. The event will include remarks by President Ron Daniels and a panel of staff members talking about forging their career paths at JHU. You can register here to attend.
CSLD was developed to help in achieving one of the university’s ambitious goals in the Ten for One strategic framework: to become a national employer of choice that recognizes, celebrates, and supports its staff and offers multiple pathways to professional and personal advancement for themselves and their families.
“Our vision is that every employee at Johns Hopkins—regardless of their job family, seniority, or their socioeconomic background or social capital—can live their life purpose through, with, or because of the Johns Hopkins community,” Brugh says.
Brugh is not new to Hopkins. He was director of operations for the Life Design Lab from 2019 to 2021, left to work as a specialist master in applied design at global management consulting firm Deloitte, and returned to Hopkins in August 2024 to launch CSLD. “I’m really excited to be back,” he says.
Brugh has hit the ground running in his new role, talking to as many staff members as possible, diving into their career and personal needs, giving presentations about CSLD, and running pilot workshops. “Our goal was to get in front of 1,000 staff members within the first 90 days, and we’re up to 1,231 as of Nov. 1,” he reports.
“I talk to people every week who are in a role that they have either outgrown or have hit some kind of a ceiling in their job family, and they don’t know where to go next,” Brugh says. Most of them love working at Hopkins and want to stay, he says, but they don’t know what steps to take to find their next role that will allow them to develop professionally, earn more money, or achieve whatever their desire might be. “Life design is here for that—and the way that we specifically do that is through design thinking activities.”
What is life design?
So what does “life design” actually mean? It’s an approach to career and professional development that focuses on creating balance and coherency in your life both inside and outside of work, says Brugh, who received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis, and executive certificate in human-centered design and innovation from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
Life design thinking, he says, focuses on three main elements: who you are, what you do, and what you believe. “We want those three things to be in alignment for anybody we work with,” he says.
Full article: https://hub.jhu.edu/at-work/2024/11/01/introducing-the-center-for-staff-life-design/
