Empowering the Vision (ENVISION) Project’s Career Exploration Workshop for 30 Tibetan college students in Delhi was held on 17th of August at Tibetan Youth Hostel, Rohini East. ENVISION have had similar workshops for school children in the past including one early this year but this is the first for college students in Delhi. We are planning to have the same for Tibetan students in Baroda in October.
Through our interaction with Tibetan Youth hitherto (in person and even virtually) through one of our main programmes, the Tibetan Career Services, we felt the pertinency to inculcate employability skills for our students and those starting their professional career after graduation. Many students unfortunately lack even basic knowledge of/and or about employability skills such as; the need to have a professional curriculum vitae (CV), a presentable and content-driven statement of purpose (SOP) for a job applicati
on and to understand rudimentary email correspondence etiquettes with a potential employer or for any formal interactions for that matter. Hence, in this workshop, the students partook sessions on self-exploration, employability skills, and career exploration through different exercises and activities. Through online registration, ENVISION enlisted just 30 participants so as to make the workshop as interactive and impactful as possible.
The Workshop began with the session on Self-Exploration in which the vitality of exploring one’s values, interests, skills and personality type was deliberated through different engaging exercises. Introspective activities on values that one hold close to and that one may exhibit especially at (prospective) workplaces or the surrounding environment in particular and in building relations with others in general. Participating students were also given time to contemplate, write and share their values, skills and how well do they know themselves through these explorative engagements.
The session on Self-Exploration was followed by another one on Employability skills. Participating Students engaged and practiced on resume building, job preparedness and cover letter writing in the session after they were guided through the definitions to samples of resumes to types of cover letters to professional ways of virtual interaction in a formal setting.
The concluding session was on Career Exploration and Goal Setting. Personality types and appropriate corresponding career options (both conventional and unconventional) were discussed in the session. In addition to this, scholarship opportunities for Tibetan students were also brought to the notice of the participating students.
The day-long Programme also highlighted initiatives of ENVISION in education, capacity building, and the opportunities that ENVISION provides to graduating and graduate students – in the form of internships, fellowships, volunteering platforms, exposure/workshop experience, etc. – and how the students can avail them.
The Workshop, in short, was a fulfilling experience and a much-needed one for Tibetan college-goers, especially those starting their professional career after graduation. Through the evaluation session at the end of the day, we found that 55.6% of students found the workshop very interactive, 37% students it moderately interactive while 7.4% didn’t find the workshop as interactive. We are determined to work on our interactive radar to even higher and live up to the expectation of those who didn’t find it so in our future Career Exploration Workshop.