Getting future-ready — CareerContact’s Primary Model
CareerContact was set up to help a range of different people, but primarily…
First-time internship or job-seekers. The confused. Those who seek clarity about their careers. Those who might have doubts about their chosen path. Deciding what work to commit to is confusing, even at later stages in life. But here at CareerContact, we believe that early exposure and contact can help students in Singapore and Southeast Asia make more informed choices.
Going Upstream
There is a strong correlation between age and lack of understanding. Naturally, at younger ages, the lack of experience and exposure means that we discover only a few fixed career paths before it’s time to pick one.
The choices we make become constrained by what we hear from teachers, parents, family, and friends. These are often influenced by their biases and often, our choices become based on other people’s choices or wishes. Unless one is fortunate enough to have access to relevant resources or connections, it would be difficult to gain exposure to the full range of careers.
Our team believes that awareness of the available career journeys helps to frame choices for further education and work experience. For example, knowing which career path to pursue will affect your choices on which corresponding degree, diploma or internship to apply for.
Our primary segment is 15–19-year-olds who are about to make decisions about technical education which will potentially impact their future careers.
CareerContact’s Event Model: CareerContent
Those seeking clarity can help others find clarity too.
This is the premise of our online events arm, CareerContent where we engaged recent graduates from junior colleges and international schools to run events with us for other students. Students as young as 17 were offered structured guidance to learn how to run an online webinar with us.
Piloting this approach as “from students, for students” in December 2020, we have had a team of 14 students running various online events with us, including webinars as well as smaller, more intimate chat sessions with industry professionals. This also ensured interest fit so that we could continue to engage and get feedback from our target audience.
We ran about 60 digital events to date from the day we started as an initiative from the end of April 2020 to the end of June 2021, reaching over 2000 students from Singapore as well as from the Philippines, Indonesia and Myanmar.
The future is digital.
Our team believes that there are fundamental digital skills that are industry agnostic which will better prepare students for their future.
While we have identified User Experience Research (UX), User Interface Design (UI), Digital Marketing as well as low/no-code web development as basic skills, we understand that the concept of “fundamental” or “basic” is rapidly changing and continually revisit what baseline digital skills are necessary for the future workplace.
Ultimately, to our team, exposure — both in terms of careers, digital skills and work experience— is a big deal. It helps us understand the various possibilities of our future and hence make better choices.
CareerContact is an ed-tech platform designed to bridge the gap between school and work. We help students develop digital skills and connect them with SMEs in Southeast Asia.
If you are a student or recent alumni interested to run events with us, feel free to reach out to us here!
