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Together at the Top
About Us 

Thousands of employees, leaders, and teams have worked with us to transform their goals into reality.  Whether you’re an organization or an individual, our custom approach means you’ll get what you need, just the way you need it and when you need it!

Meet our Founder
Serena Santillanes.jpg

Serena Santillanes, MS, NCC, MCC, LPCC

President of Career Journeys

Serena is the Founder of Career Journeys, Inc. Over 20 years ago, she formed a clear vision of creating a company that uniquely provided career and organization development services to companies and teams of all sizes.  Career Journeys, Inc. has been the successful realization of her lifelong dream!

She has been the creator of innovative career and organizational development programs for prominent universities, organizations and corporate teams. She has assisted thousands of leaders and individual contributors in realizing their professional aspirations.  Her experience includes leadership development and coaching, team building, facilitation and presentation delivery, custom curriculum design, career management, and assessment selection/interpretation.

As an organizational and career consultant, Serena has taken part in evaluating and designing customized professional development programs for organizations like Southern California Edison, Edison International, Hulu, Disney, USC, Caltech and Scripps College to name a few.

She specializes in building high performing teams who can leverage their diverse styles to produce better work results, build trust and communicate effectively as she has created and facilitated hundreds of MBTI® team sessions. She also helps leaders and individual contributors leverage their emotional intelligence to create more inclusive and healthy work environments.  She has created enterprise wide emotional intelligence programs, team sessions, and leadership development programs for many organizations and groups. Serena also helps teams with internal mobility through designing and delivering hundreds of resume and interviewing sessions for diverse company work group(s).  She also specializes in employee engagement teaching leaders and individual contributors about how to have effective and meaningful career conversations. 

  

Serena has provided high-level consulting services to such organizations as: Disney, BHP Billiton, NBCUniversal, Asplundh, Hulu, Opus Bank, SCE, Edison International, St. Joseph Center, Orange County Community Colleges, USC, Caltech, Scripps College, Mt. St. Mary's University, University of Miami, and Trinity University, to name a few.

 

She also serves as an adjunct faculty member at California State University, Northridge in their Educational Psychology and Counseling graduate program where she has prepared future career, college and psychology professionals in honing their "real-world" skills. Serena works with organizations throughout Southern California providing professional development and train-the-trainer services to better equip professionals in assessment, team session delivery, and engaging clients. 

Serena has been a keynote speaker three times for the San Diego Association for Psychological Type, a featured speaker at USC Women’s Conference, a featured speaker at the College and University Association for Human Resources on “Creating an Institutional Fit: Strategies for Recruiting the Right Candidate,” a panelist at SHRM Inland Empire’s event on “Human Resources Trends” as well as featured speaker on interviewing strategies for hiring practices and how to have career conversations with your employees as well as San Diego Tech Hub’s online events offering actionable strategies to overcome “Pandemic Fatigue” and how to manage stress in the workplace. 

She is also a published author on the topic of “Personal Branding and Leveraging Your Uniqueness” for the text Communication, Training and Development: Exploring the Cutting Edge, Kendall Hunt Publishing. Serena holds a Master of Science in Counseling, Career Counseling from California State University, Northridge, and a Baccalaureate degree in Mass Communications from the University of California at Berkeley.

Recognized Expertise in:

  • Leadership Development and Talent Management 

  • Executive and Employee Coaching 

  • Executive Presence, Emotional Intelligence, Leveraging Personality Style, Game Changing, Communication, Personal and Leadership Branding and Career Management 

  • Training, Facilitation, and Team Building  

Certifications and Experience Using:

  • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®, DiSC

  • Strong Interest Inventory®

  • EQi-2.0 Emotional Intelligence (individual and 360 versions)

  • DDI Leadership Mirror 360 

  • Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor 

Our Clients

Clients
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