BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
schedule chats and video calls (without exchanging personal details) to discuss career development needs, critique CVs and share insights on topics of personal interest and/or expertise; for example, startups, product management, assembling founding teams and more. Peer-to-peer mentoring is a powerful mechanism for our IE Community to give back and help make a tangible difference. Both IE mentors and IE mentees benefit from learning how to deliver feedback, become a good listener, grow a personal network, and increase their self-awareness. A total of 906 alumni registered, and 365 mentoring sessions took place within three months. IE Business School used a combination education technology and digital innovation to deliver the programme. Could you share some insight into the methods of delivery adopted, and how the virtual toolkit was packaged for participants? Our diverse alumni community represent more than 160 countries, and because of this – as well as the various quarantine measures caused by the pandemic – we needed to ensure a 100% digital experience to deliver the Turn It Around programme. We launched a centralised website with all available resources, as well as the lifelong learning programming with a complete agenda of all events packaged within the initiative. The campaign was delivered with a multichannel approach, leveraging our institutional channels, and with the help of various stakeholders, as well as our alumni clubs worldwide. We decided to host all online sessions on Zoom, which at the time was an unknown platform for many of us. We wanted to ensure a user-friendly platform for everyone, which provided key features such as breakout rooms, which were critical for smaller group discussions and networking. In partnership with Campus Groups, we further implemented a dedicated space on our internal platform ‘IE Connects’ with event registrations and popular session recordings, so that alumni could access resources on demand. The response from your alumni community appears to have been phenomenal. How did you communicate the initiative to them and engage them in the programme? Given the macro-context of the pandemic, and with several quarantined countries around the world, we had to rely almost exclusively on digital mechanisms in order to engage with our alumni community. We launched the initiative with a digital campaign,
using a multichannel approach. We reached out to the entire alumni community directly via email and continually posted on our official social media channels – LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. In addition, our regional alumni and career directors, as well as our club leaders worldwide, were instrumental in amplifying awareness, communicating with their alumni communities via email, WhatsApp and our new digital platform, ‘IE Connects’. In another powerful engagement mechanism, we involved alumni who volunteered as speakers in defining the learning content for each session, and encouraged them to promote the initiative via their personal social media accounts, engaging their alumni networks directly, and highlighting their active participation in the initiative. Why do you think alumni relations and lifelong learning are changing so rapidly – from networking events and fundraising to learning ecosystems, wellbeing support, and lifetime engagement? The length of professional careers is increasing – you can find data and press on the concept of the ‘third age’, ‘third career’ or ‘third chapter’. At the same time, job categories, and the skills required for them, are changing continually and at high speed. If you put these two forces together, continuous learning and upskilling are paramount, and the concept of ‘lifelong learning’ takes on an ‘It will be critical for policymakers to determine the distribution of more advanced education that will likely continue to command high tuition fees’
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