Part 2: Finishing University & Heading Abroad |
After a year as a full-time volunteer, I had discovered what I wanted to study, and transferred to the University of Canterbury to complete a Bachelor of Commerce, with a Management major specialising in Organisational Development & Leadership. It was a program that allowed me to combine my interests of business management and human resources.
After completing my Bachelor, I returned to the national headquarters of AIESEC for one more year as their national president, overseeing all of the organisation's operations over my term, setting up the financial foundations for the organisation so that the national office staff could be paid in future terms, as opposed to the voluntary roles I had held myself. A second year as a full-time volunteer put a strain on my own finances, so I took the opportunity to pick up a part time job for a commercial cleaning company. In addition to administrative roles, I was given the responsibility to develop and deliver in-house training resources and sessions for our newly implemented company IT system. While working for a volunteering organisation I had an audience keen to learn, but in this new role I first experienced an audience not interested in learning, as they were perfectly happy with the way things were currently done. In addition, instead of an audience of fairly similar age groups dealing with student volunteers, the age groups varied differently. During this time I learnt the importance of focusing on workplace benefits from new learning. For the operations person the benefit was time saved ordering to free up time for other priorities, for the administrative person the benefit was a reduction in papers to manage, etc. The experience was an invaluable part of my development as an educator. My part-time role came to an end however, when I was given the opportunity to work with AIESEC's international headquarters in the Netherlands. I was given responsibility for the organisation's Asia Pacific operations, in addition to being made a member of their Global Talent Management group. In this role I was able to build my HR expertise in key projects, including the design and roll out of a competency model for the organisation's full time staff. As well as building my management and HR experience, I continued my development as an educator, delivering training and conferences for an ever diverse group of people across the 18 countries I was directly responsible for managing, but also the nearly 100 countries in the global network at that time. Thanks to AIESEC I gained experience delivering programs in countries such as China, India, Malaysia, Egypt, Poland, Germany, Russia and Brazil. In each, I encountered new challenges, like language differences or cultural norms that had to be adapted to. I left AIESEC to follow my fiancee to Hungary, who I had met during my time in the Netherlands. |
Key points in my development as a:
HR / Management Professional
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Education Professional
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