Starting career webinars from my bedroom: the beginnings of CareerContact
Up to the last minute, slides and survey forms were being prepared. With anxiety and excitement, the session began.
Opinions are my own. None of the following represents the views of the institutions I am formally employed by.
“An educator passionate about bridging the gap between (pre-university) education and exposure to work and industry”
That was my biography on Linkedin when I first started teaching. For the longest time, even as a JC student a decade ago, I lamented the lack of exposure to different career paths in a school setting.
Yesterday, on 29 April, about 70 students from across five junior colleges attended a career webinar by speakers from Tech in Asia, GovTech, Workato, IMDA, CSA and GovTech. The webinar began barely a couple of minutes before I got off work. Homebased learning for my own students was challenging enough, let alone students I’d never met in my life.
When it ended, it felt like there was finally some proof of concept: students are hungry for inspiration, industry professionals provide invaluable inspiration and teachers can be an important intermediary.
The pain point
Pre-university students want but find it difficult to get the exposure they need and this gap is exacerbated by social distancing measures. Why such a pain point persists can be further explained through the following stakeholders:
(1) Teachers generally neither have the capacity nor are they prepared to give career advice. By no fault of their own, they are generally overloaded as it is. Without adequate familiarity with the job market or market trends, the corresponding perspectives they can provide is limited (they also have a tendency to be risk-averse).
They do, however, often have a good understanding of the preferences and aspirations of their students and are willing to share information with interested students when available.
(2) Career Guidance Units of respective schools are the main touchpoints for students. Typically run by teachers, there is some struggle to curate new content and represent less visible careers. Programmes tend to be in silos of respective schools by the nature of their operations — namely, School X will organize programmes specific to School X’s students. There are concerns of neutrality as there is a need to divorce the private interests of speakers from clouding the judgment of students. Career Guidance Units have varying degrees of exposure that is dependent on the school’s alumni and the existing staff’s network.
Nevertheless, these units remain important channels for students to obtain information and influence students’ perceptions about industry and opportunities in general.
(3) For pre-university students, while preference for “traditional icons of career success” – medicine, law, accountancy – persists (partly because of the echo chamber of peers and parents), some students are interested to learn more about other industries if the opportunity arises. However, most of them are swamped by the demands of schoolwork as it is.
(4) Organisations offering career advice – COVID-19 led to the cancellation of in-person career fairs. Some organisations hence are not represented and may then fall out of the decision-making process for pre-university students. On top of that, pre-university students tend to fall off the radar as university students are prioritised as they possess at least a baseline level of technical proficiency to contribute (and intern) to potential companies.
At the same time, COVID-19 means that some working professionals have a greater capacity to share than usual, which may in part explain the growth of other mentorship platforms like advisory.sg.
(5) Finally, not exclusive to any stakeholder: the depth of information offered at information panels tend to be inherently limited. Everyone barely scratches the surface before going home (or in today’s context, remain at home).
Starting off
Earlier last month (March 2020) I wrote an article about SupplyAlly, a barcode validation “voucher” app developed by GovTech, as a grassroots volunteer with Bishan North Youth Network assisting with reusable masks distribution. The article was picked up by Steven from GovTech. I pitched the idea of organizing a session to share about GovTech to the students and he referred me to his colleague, Ksther who referred me to other colleagues from IMDA and CSA.
To balance the panel, I approached a handful of startups: Allan (Workato), Chang Wen (Ninjavan) and Willis (Tech in Asia). I first met Chang Wen and Willis back at a MCCY Youth in Tech Panel in 2019 – I met Allan a few years back. They all readily accepted the invitation to share in spite of their busy schedules and that was especially heartening to me. It was daunting sending out the invite as I was apprehensive about why would they care about an invite from a random teacher, but I later assured myself that I had nothing to lose (except maybe my job). Their ready response helped to allay my initial fears.
With no experience in organizing webinars, I had to quickly reverse engineer my user journey attending webinars as the first webinar was planned with a runway of barely a week:
- Engage with publicity material
- Fill up a registration form
- Join webinar – get acquainted with webinar functions (Q&A, virtual raising hands)
- Post webinar feedback form
The quick workflow I scribbled out was:
- Confirm speaker lineup
- Create registration form + automate reply
- [Create oversubscribed form + automate reply] <- afterthought
- Create publicity materials
- Create feedback form
- Create slidedeck for webinar
- Create speaker coordination messaging group
- Contact schools (career guidance units, the “top”)
- Contact teacher friends (“grassroots”)
- Host practice session with panellists
- Prepare backup host for webinar
- Host webinar
- Collect post-webinar feedback
Doing this with Home-based Learning meant that every waking/ sleeping moment was either spent doing CareerContact admin or marking or planning for the next lesson. But if there is one thing I learnt from startup founders, it is that you need to invest a part of your soul for things to get running.
CareerContact was actually known as CareerConnect and Careers Connect for a few days but I ran into a pretty big oopsie with WSG Singapore. My “legal advisors” — Nettie and Marcus (both panellists for Friday’s session on law; Nettie is also a long time friend)— helped to allay fears that it was nothing serious. But hey, still something to keep in mind moving forward for anyone starting anything. Sorry WSG!
Note to self: due diligence in naming matters to avoid confusing the public
CareerContact: The Core Ideas
(1) Addressing concerns of neutrality from schools, CareerContact webinars and events (now branded as “CareerContent”) should always remain not for profit and committed to increasing exposure to students in good faith, offering balance through a range of careers rather than an explicit preference for any field.
(2) Career non-linearity as an overarching theme. Preferences and inclinations may change over time. There are many opportunities beyond one’s current imagination. There are many pathways to get to where one wants to go. CareerContact serves to spread knowledge and awareness which helps individuals make more informed decisions about their future.
(3) Reimagine how career fairs are conducted — if it is a webinar then there is no need to restrict it to a particular school. Hence, we will make them open to all schools. With a proper webinar license, the marginal cost of an additional viewer is close to zero (at the moment it is unfortunately not and we have to find ways to manage oversubscription).
(4) Partnerships are key. Every little interaction in my life was central to make things work — whether they are teachers I have met in different stages of my adulthood, startup founders I met at various working events and old friends from Junior College days — CareerContact, at its core, is about celebrating the value of relationships. Without partnerships, there is no contact in CareerContact.
(5) Follow-up from ad hoc sessions. Work-in-progress but now that a database with particular sector-based interests are established, the follow-up can be more targeted rather than everyone experiencing moments of excitement that fizzles out.
Reflections on the first session
- Time management is an issue. The inaugural session overran by half an hour. Basics of classroom teaching and planning continue to haunt me in event management — proper buffer and breaks need to be planned.
- Giving speakers more airtime. 20mins may not do their life experiences justice, lineups should be adjusted accordingly.
- Design, typos, glitches. There were some inconsistencies in time and naming conventions that should require another pair of eyes to check before sending out. Many thanks to friends and students who informed me about these issues along the way.
- Active moderation to give more thought to questions on the fly (how to structure them, how to elicit a richer response that prompts follow-up discussion). From yesterday, definitely rusty and will need to work on questioning techniques, a work-in-progress in the classroom too.
- Systematic dissemination to all schools’ career guidance units — this was rather haphazard and reliant on word-of-mouth.
Moving forward
- Possibly further breakout sessions with organisations for more intimate discussions as compared to mass webinars which are clearly rather impersonal.
- Addressing two fundamental questions for pre-university students: (1) Do I want to be there? (2) How do I get there?
- Rethinking alternatives to live Q&A.
- Having live Youtube/ Facebook streams to manage capacity constraints on Zoom.
Just like a decade ago, when I was in junior college, traditional career paths continue to dominate mainstream consciousness. These career paths are important and valued for good reason. However, we can do more for innovation and a culture of entrepreneurship to also thrive in a risk-averse society.
CareerContact is our way of trying and we are trying more in the coming year – whether you are a teacher or a working professional interested in the vision of CareerContact, feel free to get in touch at info@careercontact.org.
This is a small milestone but still, many, many thanks because now there is an inspiration for the teaching and student community as well as a track record to assemble a team to keep trying:
- Steven, for the linkup with GovTech colleagues! Really helped to get ideas moving.
- Career Guidance Units and respective schools and teaching friends — especially Cilian, Sheng Wei, Joel, Rachel early adopters who readily shared events with interested students; special thanks to Huixuan and Christine who both watched my back at every step of the way.
- Allan, Chang Wen, Christine, Guo Gen, Kevin, Nachi, and Willis — thanks for making the inaugural session possible!
- Nettie, for the legal advice and initiative to get the law session going, inspiring professionalism in preparing materials for students.
- Ephraim, Marcus and Hua Quan who quickly came on board to share with the students.
- Janson and StaffAny — my first experience with a local startup, thank you for bouncing ideas with me as I explored different ways to bridge the gap between education and exposure to industry.
