Workplace Expectations is now Office Savvy!

Image: taken by Christina during a recent Virtual Reality experience. But it's a good visual representation. 

It might seem that we've been very quiet lately, but we've been beavering away on a number of projects including:

• An 'uninternship' model and a 'new consulting' model to support students at Victoria University (both still in progress)

• Investigating some new programmes we'd like to develop as part of the suite of offerings (watch this space!)

• Working with some other awesome people to further develop ourselves as an organisation. 

And in the midst of it all, as a result of the work we've been doing with Karen and Simon, we decided that Workplace Expectations for Young Professionals was a little too long and actually our product is called Office Savvy! 

We're excited about the new name and think it better reflects the outcome of the programme and what our young professionals tell us. Our platform partner Jumpshift also changed their name, and their branding - to the bright yellow Adeption. Name changes all round.  

Savvy Up at the EdTech Conference

Today we presented Savvy Up during the 5-minute pitch session at the Education Technology (EdTech) conference in Albany - here you can see us doing our presentation! We really enjoyed it and got some good feedback. 

We discussed the challenges facing young people and employers today - the gap between the youth experience and what employers want (they don't have those features yet). This has also been exacerbated by generational factors - so it's much harder for young people to get that crucial first job experience which teaches them basic workplace skills such as being on time to work.

A great quote from one of today's speakers (I can't remember who, sorry!): "Soft skills are hard skills." In our experience, this is true.  

Tertiary educators: You can help by introducing workplace skills earlier on in the qualification. We'll work with you to train your students and get them ready for the workplace. 

Employers: You can help by creating a paid internship or entry-level job for a young person. We'll make it easy for you to hire them by doing the heavy lifting of training them in the basic skills, through the Workplace Expectations programme. 

Everyone: You can help by hiring a young person in your neighbourhood for small tasks to help them get some first job experience.   

We'll talk about this more in detail at a later date. 

Thanks to Abhisek Kala for the photo, and to everyone who gave us feedback or helped us prepare our pitch. We're really grateful.  

Manager module underway

What are your biggest challenges as a manager when managing young professionals? And, how can we help? That's the question we're looking to answer as we further develop our module to help managers understand what is different about managing young professionals, and how to engage them and on-board them correctly during their first 90 days.

We'd love to hear from you on this - look out for our survey coming out shortly. 

Sport NZ offering Savvy Up's onboarding programme to young professionals

We're excited to announce that from February 2017, Sport New Zealand is offering our online course Becoming A Workplace Athlete as part of their online learning platform www.sporttutor.nz. This means that all young professionals starting their first job in the sport and recreation sector will have free access to the course through Sport Tutor.

The course is particularly designed for young professionals in their first three months of a new role, but relevant to all young professionals as they start out in the workplace.

It covers everything from what it means to be professional and how to have a chat with your manager, through to how to set up good habits at work and what to do when you don’t know what to do. The course also provides downloadable resources to guide key conversations necessary to workplace success.

We'll be supporting the sport and recreation sector young professionals with a Community Champion - a young professional who will be the first port of call in the course discussion forums for help and support.    

For more information: contact us.

Happy 2nd birthday, Savvy Up!

We celebrated with some cupcakes from our friends at Sweet Release Bakery in Wellington. There'll be a proper party later this month. 

We celebrated our 2nd birthday on 10th February! It's a good time to reflect - anything worth doing is worth doing well, and spending the time to put in solid foundations.

We're about to go live with a very cool project, and we've completed our pilot for JumpShift and are working through the feedback received from our Sounding Board team (the young professionals who are testing it out). It's exciting to be sharing what we've created with others, and even more exciting when they say how much they like it. 

We're very proud of what we've achieved so far, and really looking forward to reaching and supporting even more young professionals this year. - C

SavvyUp is live on JumpShift!

We've just gone live on the new JumpShift platform - so if you're in our Sounding Board test group, look out from an email from us next week!