GDO710 - Week 11 - RealWORKS
This week we reviewed Real WORKS, the Falmouth University employability service. This included a deep dive in the Art of the Approach course from the Real WORKS team. The Art of the Approach course is focused on harnessing your personal brand for social media, networking, or promoting our businesses.
The Art of the Approach content was a deep dive through nine different modules, covering branding, social media, job searching, networking, and resilience.
Feelings and Thoughts
This week was my least favorite of the entire course. This is mainly due to how applicable I felt the content from this week was for me. While I understand why the content is important and who it is targeted for, I feel like at this point in my career I've gained a good understanding of these topics for my industry.
Now, that is not to say I am a an expert in all of these matters, so my focus on the content this week was to find two areas that I could learn and grow from.
Evaluation
The content of the course was very detailed and provided a deep dive into some areas I hadn't explored before.
Content that was helpful:
-
The content was well organized and built off each other
-
Personal branding and resilience
-
The LinkedIn profile builder was very helpful to optimize my profile
Content that was not as helpful:
-
Networking map
-
Job searching and placements
-
Effective online platforms
The key take away from this week was how I need to continue to maintain my social media network in order to help build my personal brand. My personal brand has been a focus of mine for a number of years, you can see from my personal website at: jesseorndorff.com. For my branding, I've decided to focus on technology for social good, aiming to be relevant to any organization that is looking to use technology to do good in the world.
Additionally, while looking for a job, applying for funding, or any activity that requires us to put ourselves out there, the importance of resilience cannot be understated. I just did quick calculation and out of the 21 project and funding proposals I applied for this year, zero received funding, and only three resulted in a shortlist or callback. The timing for this content from RealWORKS was very helpful for what I am experiencing right now. It is easy to start to look at all the rejections and take them personally, but reflecting on why they are not working is important to refining my pitch to achieve better results.
For my academic research this week I reviewed an academic journal article on lean startup and agile methodologies. The aim of the article was a descriptive and thematic analysis of 71 papers focused on Lean Startup, Agile methodologies, and customer development (Silva et al., 2020). What I found most interesting is that the most common theme across the 71 papers focused on ICT. While this makes sense since these papers are looking at common methodologies in the technology sector, what it shows is a large gap in research on other industries in which Agile methodologies could be applied. I'd like to dive deeper on this in the next few months, aiming to look at how Agile can be used in other sectors like educations, health, and human rights.
Action Plan
My action plan going forward is to finish well! The big goal over the next week is to review all my past CRJs and clean them up for the final submission. Additionally, I will start drafting a script for my video project highlighting what I've learned over these last 12 weeks and where I want to aim my studies.
References
Silva, D., Ghezzi, A., Aguiar, R., Cortimiglia, M. and ten Caten, C., 2020. Lean Startup, Agile Methodologies and Customer Development for business model innovation. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 26(4), pp.595-628.