UBC Tech Career Fair experience

Bjorn, Dennis and I participated at the UBC Tech Career Fair organized by the CSSS (Computer Science Student Society), UBC Engineering Physics and UBC IEEE last week. The poster and the brochure we prepared can be found in my previous entry.

The three of us were there to promote the use of e-portfolios as a career and personal development tool. Despite the fact that we, unlike others, didn’t have any job opportunities to offer, we still caught many students’ interests. Students are open to learn about e-portfolios, and how it might help them job hunting. I printed 200 copies of the brochure and about 70% of them are gone now. Gayle Mavor, Communications Coordinator of the Department of Computer Science, also took a pile of the brochure and agreed to distribute them within the department. In addition, we also asked students to leave us their email addresses if they’d like to attend a workshop on building e-portfolios. To our surprise, we collected more than 40 email addresses. I think it’s a really good start as this is our first try to promote e-portfolios to students outside a course setting.We had a few FAQ from students during the day:

• Are you hiring?
• What is the difference between an e-portfolio and buying my own domain name and setup a website of my own?
• Do you have a database of e-portfolios like monsters.ca, so employers can come to the site and view the pool of e-portfolios?
• Do you have an online tutorial somewhere?
• Will employers really look at my e-portfolios?

Regarding to the last question, Dennis and I spoke with some of the company representatives at the career fair. Many of them suggested that an e-portfolio will be helpful during the final phase of the hiring process. The reason behind is that corporates (see the list of companies participated at the UBC Tech Career Fair here) get hundreds and thousands of job applications each year. They usually have their own software that filters out resumes by keyword queries. Thus, employers/HR’s generally wouldn’t have a chance to look at the applicants’ e-portfolios/websites until they come down to 3-5 applications.

Having said that, some of the representatives also expressed interests in tools that would allow them to actually see the applicants’ work before interviewing them. It allows them to learn more about the applicants, and to actually see proofs of the skills and knowledge the potential applicants claim to have on their resumes.