Peer-to-peer mentoring is a powerful mechanism for our IE Community to give back, and help make a tangible difference
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 ‘third age’, ‘third career’ or ‘the 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 ‘life-long learning’ takes on an even greater importance than in the past. The availability of educational content is incredible these days – you can find materials on any topic for free or at very low cost. The problem is that digesting raw content is not a deep form of education. Knowledge without associated experience doesn’t often lead to the acquisition of skills.
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 a span of 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 multi-channel 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 break-out 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 has 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 multiple- channel 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.
What’s needed is curation, and increasingly, I see it as the role of
Business Schools to take on this function. So, I think we will see the paradigm of education as a ‘punctated event’ (or set of disconnected events) shift to a new paradigm based on an ongoing relationship between learners and their
institutions – focused not only on the career-enhancing skills, but also on life-enhancing skills in areas such as wellbeing.
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Ambition | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
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