ALUMNI YEAR 11 CAREERS EVENING Usually for our Year 11 careers evening we invite around 20 speakers from our alumni community in to school to run sessions about their profession for groups of around 15 students at a time. The students sign up for three sessions of twenty minutes which they attend throughout the course of the evening. With restrictions still in place that do not allow us visitors on site, we had to come up with an alternative online solution. It was an ambitious undertaking, setting up an event with 124 students, 20 speakers and 20 breakout rooms and something we had never attempted before, however, it did allow us to invite alumni from overseas as well as Dubai, therefore giving us a bigger pool of industry expertise. From an NHS doctor, British Army Officer, Architect, Investment Banker, Lawyer, Structural and Civil Engineers as well as alumni from the UK Civil Service, KPMG, Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, to name a few, we had a wealth of knowledge to share their experiences with our students. Ahead of the event, students signed up for three rotations of breakout sessions which would take place through the Webex platform. This involved setting up three separate meetings and adding the speakers and students to the correct breakout sessions for each one using their email addresses. Testing the system with a few staff before the event proved successful, so what could possibly go wrong?! The evening began well with a welcome from Mr Lambert, followed by an introduction from alumnus Jean-Michel Gauthier. All appeared to be going well until we activated the breakout sessions only to find that a number of
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speakers and students had not been moved to their breakout rooms. As panic followed, it became apparent that emails entered on Webex were case sensitive and if the email had not been entered correctly on entry, the user was not recognised in the breakout sessions! With only 20 minutes for the first session, we raced to try to allocate students to the correct rooms, but sadly it resulted in several students missing out on their first session. By Session 2 and having identified the problem, students were asked to sign in again using their correct details. Unfortunately, there were still a few issues and it was only in Session 3 that the majority of the students were transferred to their breakout sessions successfully. Obviously, we were very disappointed that this event did not go quite to plan despite our very best efforts, but our alumni have offered to run some more sessions over the coming months, so that the Year 11 students will not have missed out. Mrs Debra Turpie Communications, Marketing & Alumni Relations
