Career Talk with UTM Career Centre

Date: 16th March 2021

Venue: Webex Online Meeting

Organiser: Jawatankuasa Kolej Mahasiswa, Kolej Tun Dr. Ismail (JKM KTDI)

Position: Program Director

 

Career Talk with UTM Career Centre is an online talk session that discussed about the topic "Soft Skills and Employment Preparation". This virtual program is a co-curriculum program so it is open to all students in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). There are two invited panel that we have in this program which are Dr. Salasiah Abbas and Mr. Tan Choon Seng. Dr. Salasiah Abbas is an Assistant General Manager at United Malayan Land Bhd (UMLand) while Mr. Tan Choon Seng is a Senior Consultant/Trainer/Coach at Academind Network. Both of the speaker have many experiences about working life environment so they are here to share about it with UTM Students. The first speaker, Dr Salasiah, talk about the skills needed to face the working environment in the future. She highlighted 7 soft skills that are really important for the students to develop and prepare. Each of the soft skills mentioned are elaborated clearly and more details during this sharing session. The second panel, Mr. Tan Choon Seng, giving his talks that focus more on the preparation for the employment. One of the preparation that being mentioned by this speaker is about the interview guideline and what should student do to prepare themselves. This talk session was held for about 2 hours starting from 2 PM unti 4 PM.

This program really taught me a lot since this is my first time having an experience as a program director. Handling a program is not an easy task and really takes time to adapt with it. So, what I can learn from this process is firstly about leadership skills. I have about 10 people under me as a committee for this program and this indirectly teach me how to become a leader to them. Since the work progress is done during the final examination period, I need to manage and divide the task properly between committee members so that it does not affect their final examination and at the same time, the work can be done. From this, I learnt to be more considerate towards other people and not only think about myself. In my opinion, someone who have a selfish attitude and mind set in themselves does not suitable to be a good leader to other people. So from this, whenever I make a decision, I will try my best to think about other committee’s perspective. But I still need to learn a lot to become a good one. Secondly, what I learn from this program is about communication skills. Communication is really important because sometime, it can lead to the good outcomes and sometime can also lead to the misunderstanding. So when I am giving the instructions to the members, I will try to explain it clearly as possible because I don’t want the miscommunication problem occur in the future and this will cause to the misleading in the work that need to be done.