25 Aug 2020|Noida | Amity University, Noida ( Online )
A webinar on ‘Start your Professional Networking – The LinkedIn Way
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A webinar on ‘Start your Professional Networking – The LinkedIn Way’ was conducted by Mr. Satish Kumar - Country Head- Search & Staffing Business - LinkedIn India. He shared at length about how to make the most of this important networking platform with a focus on Tips on creating an attractive LinkedIn profile; Best practices for using LinkedIn for professional branding and networking; How to use LinkedIn as a research tool; How to use LinkedIn to get hired and how to gain social proof for your skills and talents. He shared a real life story of a recent job loss experienced by one of his first connections and how he leveraged LinkedIn to get hired again as he was organized and smart in his approach. He advised students to have a fine balance between time spent on social media, family life and investing time in doing something constructive and looking for a job. He stressed on understanding the importance of having a strong digital presence on a professional networking platform. He averred that it helps to understand market trends.
Mr. Kumar gave deep insights on how to build the LinkedIn profile by keeping it current with using a current Photo; Have a Headline stating who you are and what is Unique about you; Add Location as it boosts visibility; Have a Summary providing a more personal overview of your career and highlight your areas of expertise; Highlight your work history and key positions you’ve held in your Experience and make use of Media including photos, presentations to show your thought leadership. He asked students to focus on building a professional network; discover existing connections; Search for new connections and asked students to expand their network strategically. He suggested to begin the interaction with the proposed connection by introducing who you are; how you came across their profile and how they can help you. For building their personal brand, he advised students to add their voice to the ongoing conversations, use long post- LinkedIn Pulse to share your views on current affairs in the form of simple stories. He averred to students not to ask for a job directly, don’t try to sell and don’t share too much depicting arrogance but be humble. He further suggested students to use LinkedIn to track market intelligence and to gain new insights and to keep their thinking fresh. Sharing techniques on how to use their network to connect to opportunity, Mr Kumar suggested to message connections; ask for informational interviews; request referrals; request recommendations; find a mentor with career advice and add value & engage. For searching and applying for jobs on LinkdInd, he suggested setting of career interests; search for jobs; create search alerts; review “jobs you may be interested in”; follow companies and apply actively.
A webinar on ‘Social Business Creation Competition: A new way to teach social entrepreneurship through experiential learning and gamification methods’ was conducted by Dr. Mai Thi Thanh Thai - Associate Professor, Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation; Director of the Social Business Creation competition; Researcher, Mosaic – Creativity & Innovation Hub; Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship - HEC Montreal, University of Montreal, Canada.
Dr. Mai Thi Thanh Thai’s expertise lies in entrepreneurship, strategies in emerging markets and qualitative methods. Her research focuses on the link between entrepreneurship and its socioeconomic, cultural and political contexts. She has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals, contributed many book chapters, edited two books, and presented at numerous academic conferences. She has won many local and international awards for her performance and commitment in her different roles as a researcher, teacher and entrepreneur throughout her career. At present, she is running the global program Social Business Creation that uses gamification to teach university students social entrepreneurship and development of social business models that use market mechanisms to solve social issues.
Social entrepreneurship has gained popularity since the introduction of the concept in the early 1980s. As such, there has been a steady growth of social entrepreneurship courses and programs. However, scholars critique that the current approaches are too theoretical and that experiential learning is far more effective. Recognizing the need, we created an innovative method, called Social Business Creation that focuses on action and facilitates students' learning by providing online instructions during the early stage of learning while students work in the field and giving face-to-face instructions at later stages. We combine several methods that have been proven to be effective: (1) experiential learning (i.e. learning by doing) to hone students' skills; (2) gamification mechanisms (i.e., competition for prizes) to boost students' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations; (3) incubation methods to help students to transform their ideas into concrete projects; (4) and live case studies (i.e. having successful social entrepreneurs to interact with students) to inspire them.
She shared that Covid 19 has pushed people into innovation and are being made to test new ways of working and innovation. “We have to change our mindset and ways of doing business”, said Dr. Thai who added that crisis are sometimes very good test that bring us to higher levels of innovation. She averred that Social businesses are designed to use market mechanism to solve social challenges and that’s what their students are taught. She detailed about the history of social entrepreneurship education and how improvement was needed in the present model of education to encourage social business creation. She further added how their model has also got the go ahead from the government for creating an environment for economic development. Dr. Thai also talked about the methodology behind social business creation that comes with a focus on changing the mindset as the right mindset stays with entrepreneurs all throughout their life. And for changing the mindset, focus is given to the thoughts and questions behind knowing, being and doing. Focus is given to experiential learning for its proven effectiveness.