session Speaker: City of Elk Grove Vice Mayor, Darren Suen
Session Overview: In honor of Asian American Pacific Islander month, join us for our May CDP workshop with City of Elk Grove Vice Mayor, Darren Suen. Get ready for a great discussion on how you can use your personality, strengths, and everyday actions to move up in state service. This session focuses on the soft skills you already use—communication, teamwork, problem solving, adaptability, leadership—and how those strengths can supercharge your career growth. He will also dig into real strategies you can start using right away, like volunteering for projects, stepping up for stretch assignments, joining workgroups, shadowing others, and finding small ways to get noticed for the right reasons. You’ll learn how to highlight your strengths in applications, talk confidently about your talents in interviews, and show you’re ready for more responsibility. Vice Mayor Suen speaks from experience and will share how he restarted his career after the Great Recession and advanced in state service. He will talk about his journey into elected office and how he balanced his professional career while taking on multiple roles in organizations that support the community. He will also share how he pushed through setbacks and learned from his failures along the way.
About the Speaker: Vice Mayor Darren Suen joined the council in 2014. Beginning with his great-grandparents settling in the Delta, he was born and raised in the nearby Greenhaven/Pocket neighborhood, and his family has lived in Elk Grove since 2001. Vice Mayor Suen represents the city regionally on the Sacramento Area Council of Governments Board of Directors and was the first Elk Grove representative to chair the six-county, 22-city member board. For the city, the Vice Mayor serves on the Affordable Housing, Project Elevate, Audit, Homeless, and Government Relations Ad Hoc committees. His professional background, specializing in transportation, water resources, and land use has proven useful on the Council. Vice Mayor Suen is the Executive Director for the San Joaquin Area Flood Control Agency. He is a registered civil engineer with a master’s in business administration, a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with the Project Management Institute (PMI), and an American Leadership Forum (ALF) Fellow.