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HOTO:
Objective: To streamline the process of acquiring knowledge on career planning and to make it more accessible to students to encourage them to start planning early
This document will address the following points below. They will be further elaborated on to highlight the difficulties, value added and any other points to note of for improvements.
- Key partners: CSO, Paradigm shift
- Current members
- Activities: Website, Publicity efforts
- Process
- Success Indicators
In-depth Elaboration
Key partners
CSO: In the beginning, the committee was heavily reliant on CSO in obtaining resources as they are they have an archive of all the content needed for students in career planning. However, due to red tape, the process of obtaining the resources were extremely slow; it took approximately the entire semester to obtain these resources. The reliance on CSO to obtain key resources were inevitable as they had all the knowledge and documents that the CPR comm could not produce with the same level of quality. Yet, during the wait for the resources, other goals could have been met, such as researching on platforms to gather internships from, addressing flaws of the CSO i.e. the inadequacies of CSO and filling the gaps by ourselves (e.g. their lack of focus on the emotional aspects of career planning like how make wise career choices, when to take up a job — all of which could partially be address by Paradigm Shift).
CSO wanted to partner with CPR in order to raise awareness of rate importance of early career planning and increase the urgency of students to start planning. This perhaps has been met to some degree, however, the extent of impact is immeasurable due to missing success indicators.
Paradigm Shift: This group of students had a keen interest in helping students overcome their own self-doubts in achieving remarkable progress in their lives despite poor academic performance. CPR collaborated with PS so that PS could reach out to more students. However, CPR has not done that for PS as CPR did not have a strong presence among the student body and had limited publicity avenues to publicise the events for PS, noting the Facebook posts are a poor publicity method. My suggestion is that we could have highlighted the key useful points that could be derived from one or two PS talks and disseminate them to students on the CPR website to showcase how useful the PS talks are to encourage them to attend them. On top of benefiting PS by reaching out to whatever audience CPR has, CPR will gain by being able to adopt the non-technical career planning concepts on its website and allow students to realise that career-planning is more than just acquiring the relevant skills to score a good job; it is also about figuring out what is best for them in terms of alignment with their fundamental beliefs and goals beyond career like helping the elderly (financial planning for the elderly), producing impactful products (working in unilever r&d department or microsoft marketing department).
Current members
The currently 5 members are Jethro, Hew, Ping Fang, Andrea and I, not inclusive of Janice, who has retired.
Is it necessary to have senior members in the committee?
There were 4 seniors in this committee for efficiency in the progression of the committee such as creating required materials needed for the website. Yet, the efficiency was undermined by the lack of knowledge on career planning. Their advantage were in having attended previous CSO classes and/or talks. Therefore, it is useful to get seniors to be part of the committee but there is not a great difference in the wealth of knowledge on career planning gathered by the year 2 student and the year 1 student. Perhaps, convincing a year 3 or 4 student to be part of the committee would be more useful as they would have gone through at least 1 internship and would have more knowledge on where to source for internships, how to prepare for them and offer insights on what they should have done previously on hindsight and what their relatively successful peers did (note: successful in terms of gathering internships that are align with what they want).
What are the skills and knowledge required?
In terms of skill diversity, the team was strong. CPR requires a dynamic team of members who are capable in marketing content face-to-face, designing, using wordpress or have strong career planning knowledge or are innovative in their ideas. At this stage, perhaps it is important to have more than one designer since CPR is has a strong focus on publicity and so will require more than one designer to produce publicity materials like videos.
Activities
In the first semester, the focus was on obtaining key information on career planning from CSO. In the following semester, the focus was on consolidating the information, creating infographics to aid in content absorption and uploading them onto the website before publicity efforts kicked in. As mentioned above, in the first semester, there could have been less reliance on CSO and more work could have been done independently.
Website: The website was ready for launch around mid second semester. It took two weeks to design the materials and 1 full day to set up everything on the website. What was missing from the website was the section on non-technical preparations for career planning i.e. how to find work that you like. Also missing from the website is the emphasis of figuring our career interests through talks and event. Furthermore, it should be highlighted on the website that internships through networking sessions have the highest success rate as compared to online applications. Besides this, there should be a page on how the resources can be used i.e. a real-life example of how a student uses the websites and resources in the form of a short clip or appealing infographics or interview. This might be might received by students if a well-known/ popular student who has great career plans were to be interviewed for this, e.g. marzouq. To summarise in a sentence, the missing parts are the parts on a real-life student example and the non-technical aspect of career planning. [update] There are several missing content on the page as the domain seemed to have crashed.
Publicity efforts: The current main mode of publicity is through Exam Welfare Pack Giveaway event. However, other modes of publicity should be considered like publicity during camps. Furthermore, publicity content can stretch further to include student ambassadors i.e. to interview students and showcase real-life example of how one can go about using the school resources and other resources gathered by the CPR comm to have a comprehensive plan of one’s career.
Publicity is the most important aspect of CPR, yet, the modes of reaching out to students is limited. Therefore, it is vital for us to tap on the power of word of mouth, which can be initiated through screening of publicity videos on the TV outside BCR. Preferably an outrageously ingenious video with substance that captures that attention of students and creates a buzz should be produced e.g. showcasing a mini-celebrity, creating it in the theme of a major event like project xoxo
Success indicators
There are no clear success indicators as of now. Also, there wasn’t a study to figure out how many students were compelled to become more engaged with career planning although there are positive news that more students have been using the services provided by CSO. Still, this is a statement made by CSO which was not quantified and we are unaware of what the increase was relative to. To track the impact of CPR’s efforts in the future, for the website, ideally, it should comprise of systems that allows for collection of website visit statistics. However, it is to be noted that implementing of such a system would be based on its feasibility on working on a wordpress page — its feasibility would have to be checked by the comm sect.
Future plans/ Goals:
The future plans and goals are to be formed by the successive director. They need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (S.M.A.R.T). On top of the multiple suggestions given in the preceding paragraphs, the following are other areas that could be improved on that are straight-forward and do not need explanation:
- Renaming of committee
- Social media page with BizConnect
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CPR
—> consolidation of partner websites on CPR website would be better
Publicity
—> WOM
—> get professors to publicise the website or other events whenever possible
—> use the bizad club name (in emails etc.)
Personas
—> proactive students —> make internships easier to apply
—> freshies who are not proactive—>
Paradigm shifts to encourage them
– year 1: use bizad club to publicise career planning during events e.g. camps (publicise at the beginning of the camps)
CSO
- how can the results be quantifiable?
- meeting with them (Wednesday is a good day for the team)
#1
—> other platforms for internship application (more internship opportunities)
-> categorisation of the internship websites e.g. those for startups will be grouped together
-> overseas internships (IRO) + links
Publicity
—> WOM
—> get professors to publicise the website or other events whenever possible
—> use the bizad club name (in emails etc.)
—> Publicity of CPR during camps (15 min talk by CPR to talk to them)—> this has been around for very long “tradition”
#2
—> instructions
-> instructions on how to use internship application platforms e.g. talentedge (work with person doing task 1). These will be placed on our blog
#3
—> clear misconceptions on the websites
-> from the file on google drive (ping fang and jethro’s work), consolidate the misconceptions and turn them into an article for our blog
#4
Branding of CPR —>
– (1) “Paradigm Shift”/ “Non-profit Org” + “CSO”
– (2) Bizad club not just for year ones
– (3) content that is less formal and corporate – humorous platform for internship application
– (4) Brand it as the best place to look for advice (LT goal)
oxytocinoflife 