Leadership Development Specialist

In the game “Follow the Leader,” one person is chosen as a leader, and everyone else has to follow them around, doing everything they do. When someone fails to do what the leader does, they’re out of the game. The last person standing is the new leader.

When you’re a kid, becoming a leader is as easy as mimicking one. When you’re an adult, however, becoming a leader takes a lot of time and a lot of training. And as a Leadership Development Specialist, you’re the person who’s in charge of managing that time and conducting that training.

Hired by companies that want to enrich their employees, train their Managers, and develop their executives, you’re paid as the Leadership Development Specialist to create, schedule, and deliver sessions, seminars, and workshops that teach people leadership skills, such as those associated with teambuilding, management, motivation, organization, and communication.

To do your job well, Leadership Development Specialists must first develop a leadership philosophy: You must create your own vision for what makes an effective leader, as well as ideas about how to teach that vision to other people. After that, you’ll spend your days marketing your leadership philosophy, designing educational programs that marry it with clients’ training objectives, then giving presentations that teach participants how to inspire, motivate, and manage other people.

Your presentations might include instructional lectures, roundtable discussions, group activities, or even written assignments and assessments. Your method can vary as long as your mission doesn’t: Your goal is to teach people to be more successful by being more effective — to turn followers into leaders.