Lesson Learned from Career Week

By: Caitlin Charles

Before Career Week 2011 began, the LACD team had set certain goals on what we hoped to accomplish throughout the week.  One of those goals in particular was to raise our average event attendance from 15 the previous year, to 25.  This coming week we are going to be crunching the numbers and tallying the results to see exactly how Career Week turned out, but I can already tell we are going to be much closer to our goal of 25.  The lesson I learned during the week however, was one of quantity versus quality.  I noticed this during, what I feel was one of our more successful events, Get LinkedIn.

Set up in the Beering lobby from 10:00am to 2:00pm on Wednesday, I went into the day hoping that we would have a very large number of students stop by to sign up for LinkedIn accounts, or ask questions.  I found that the success of this event, however, was not measured by the number of students who stopped by during those hours, but the quality of help we were able to give to each one.  We had a fairly steady attendance of students, and we ended up with around 20 total at the event.  While under our original goal of 25, I left that event later in the day feeling so proud of what we had done.  I was able to sit down and spend about 15 to 20 minutes with each student, fully developing each of their account's and answering all of their questions.  While I am no "expert" myself, as I learned in the LinkedIn Workshop later in the afternoon, I felt that each student left feeling more comfortable and confident in their ability to use LinkedIn to network, and gaining LACD as a resource for their professional lives.  While however cliche it may sound,  it truly felt good to sit down with my peers and help them utilize LinkedIn as a networking resource, and see them get excited about all of the connections they were going to make.

With Hotbox Pizza and Hungry Boiler there to join us and support us, in addition to how successful I felt this particular event went, Get LinkedIn has been set as my "lesson learned" and my favorite Career Week 2011 event.