Career Coach
As a professor of management at VU’s School of Business and Management, James Woodrow uses his decades of experience as a manager, personal coach and counselor to help students find their career paths.
“I enjoy creating a classroom that equips students to know themselves better and identify their future vocation,” he says. “It’s been very rewarding to help others learn more about their gifts as Christ-centered managers and leaders in a variety of organizations. God gives us our talents and it’s our responsibility to develop them.”
Woodrow began his career in the family furniture business and the resort industry. But he found his calling in Christian higher education, where he has spent more than twenty years in positions as varied as chief marketing officer, chief of staff and career counselor. His purpose in each was to increase organizational efficiency and effectiveness, teach people how to be more productive and satisfied, and to market the institution effectively.
At Pepperdine University, his marketing campaigns resulted in a decade of substantial enrollment increases and several awards for publications from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Now in his sixth year at VU, Woodrow teaches graduate and undergraduate students the fundamentals of management and organization. He also shows young people how to pinpoint their career calling, a passion that grew out of his own frustration as a college student trying to choose an occupational field.
Woodrow, an avid outdoorsman and world traveler, grew up in the farming town of Somerset, Pennsylvania, known for its Amish and Mennonite communities. His family’s Quaker heritage dates back to the early 1700s.
He earned a bachelor’s degree from David Lipscomb College, a master’s degree from Peabody College, a second master’s degree from USC and a doctorate from Vanderbilt. He has spent much of his career at Pepperdine, most recently as director of London programs. Upon returning to California in 2003, in search of a new career direction, he was offered a position at VU.
“I didn’t know where God was going to lead me, but I’m convinced that he led me to Vanguard in a full-time teaching capacity to teach students to understand and develop their God-given talents,” he says. “It’s just been a terrific experience. I have absolutely loved the sense of community and the spirituality of my colleagues and the students. The depth of their faith is incredible. I think the world of the students.”
His basic goal in each of his classes is to show students how to identify their own strengths and workplace styles, to make them better managers and professionals.
“I help students understand what motivates people and how different people communicate,” he says. “The heart of all my courses is how important it is to have a clear mission, vision and goals that everyone embraces and supports.”
Woodrow authored a college guide, The Christian College Advantage, contributed toward books on management and published articles about the role of Christian higher education in society. In 2006, he took forty-one VU students to Europe to tour and study in eight countries.
“It was an incredible experience to grow close to those students and to be involved with them not just in an academic capacity but a spiritual and social capacity,” he says. “We still stay in touch. We had great rapport. I look back on it with fondness.”
When not in the classroom, Woodrow is an unrepentant adventurer. He recently whitewater rafted, hiked and biked in Panama and Costa Rica. He has crossed the Arctic Circle in Norway, walked along the Great Wall of China, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, sailed the Nile River and the Ganges River of India, hiked into the jungle temples of Cambodia and visited the Himalayas in Nepal. He has traveled to eighty countries, integrating his first-hand observations from around the world into his international management courses.
“The driving force behind a lot of my travel is to see and experience God’s creation,” he says. “My meditation and prayer life is usually walking on the beach or taking a hike up into the mountains. The outdoors is where I feel especially close to God. One of my favorite retreats is up in the Mammoth Lakes area.”
Vanguard “has become quite a special community to me,” he says. “Over the years, I’ve grown to realize that I prefer small, personal communities, which is why Vanguard is so attractive to me. Teaching here keeps feeling better and better each year.”