We’re continuing to meet the demand for highly skilled workers by shifting our popular Industry Connect events online; the first ITP in New Zealand to offer a virtual version of its career fairs.
Our Industry Connect events are important ‘match-making’ sessions, connecting students with employers to help them find jobs at the end of their study. With the current COVID-19 restrictions on physical distancing, we replaced this year’s in-person events with a series of virtual career fairs held over three days in August.
Leni Fifita represented the School of Trades and Services Lecturer and our ITABs programme
Director of Industry Partnerships, Heather Stonyer, said the virtual event was a ‘huge success’. Heather says that finding employment in their area of study is one of the key outcomes of student success at Unitec and that doesn’t change because of alert levels.
Representation from our Schools included Trades, Computing, Engineering, Building Management, Business, and Environmental and Animal Sciences. Students were able to schedule times to visit exhibitors in their virtual booths, or online video rooms.
Caryn De Castro, People Leader, represented the ANZ Bank
More than 1,700 students registered for the virtual careers event and over the course of the three days, we hosted nearly 40 businesses.
Exhibitors included Datacom, Fulton Hogan, IBM New Zealand, MYOB, New Zealand Bird Rescue, Piritahi, Spark, and Warren & Mahoney Architects. Many of these businesses came with jobs on offer.
Michelle Nunes-Vaz represented accountancy and services business, Tax and Trust
“Not only were our students work-ready, our businesses also came ready to sign up our graduates,” said Heather. “While the current pandemic has resulted in many people losing their jobs, there are growth industries in New Zealand that are actively seeking to employ people.”
“With so much of New Zealand’s recovery supported by digital technology, there has never been a better time to get into tech,” says IBM New Zealand HR Manager Amandine Crosswell.
A Unitec graduate and exhibitor, Libby Lavrova, agrees and said that she wanted to give back to students who are in the position I was once in. Libby Lavrova graduated from Unitec with a Bachelor of Computing Systems in 2018 and is now a Cognitive Engineer at IBM.
Graduate Libby Lavrova and Industry Connect IBM exhibitor
She attended our virtual Industry Connect Career event as a way to give back to students – “I was once in that position and can relate to what they’re going through,” says Libby, who joined IBM through the our internship partnership programme. To apply for the programme, Libby created a mobile and back-end application that was designed to allow people to upload photos of plants and tag the photos on a map so that other people could find them too.
Libby really enjoyed the practical and hands-on approach of her Bachelor’s Degree at Unitec and believes that it helped her build the technical and soft skills to thrive in an ever-changing environment like IBM.
Libby has been supported by Unitec since she was a Year 12 student at Kamo High School in Whangarei, when she participated and won the Mobile App Competition for Girls in 2014 and was awarded a tuition fee scholarship to study at Unitec. Many of the lecturers who supported Libby in the competition then became her lecturers and still remain close contacts to this day.