26 February 2015
IBEM Life Stories is a student-led initiative that allows the class to share their wide and diverse experience on interesting topics. In this session, Justus Delp and Midori Kagaya talked about Career Opportunities in Brazil.
Finding a job is becoming increasingly competitive even for students from top Universities such as from the University of Edinburgh’s Business School. The trend is to seek more specialised skills in order to differentiate oneself of the vast numbers of graduates each year. However, while the competition in advanced economies in the West is increasing and growth is declining, the economic gravity is shifting to the emerging markets. Growth rates are at double digits and an increasing number of emerging market firms are entering the global stage. Considering this shift, it seems to pose an obvious question why graduates do not seek employment where the growth is going to be?
These were some of the initial thinking driving the conveyors of the Career Talk in Brazil. Moreover, given the high diversity of the students within the International business and emerging markets program, in combination, to the highly multinational work experience among the students, there is a great potential to learn about multicultural differences. Multicultural experience is very important, but is something that is easily covered up by great work load and is not always capitalised on. Hence, this seminar sought to incentives the participants to capitalise on their different work experience. In particular, if one is seeking an employment abroad this tacit insight into the cultural sensitivities can be crucial to secure a position.
The session launched by Midori Kagaya and Justus Delp was presented in the business school at the Edinburgh University on 9th February 2015. The talk outlined some general information about the employment opportunities and conditions as well as some insights into application documents. This included among others the interview procedures and features in Brazil. The aim was to introduce the audience to the topic. Subsequently, there was a little break in order for the students to share some experience of their own in different working settings. Finally, some real world examples of graduates, who are employed in Brazil or have worked there, were shown as a practical insight and advice to the audience. The event was attended by students, professional staff and the Student Development team and it was well received, based on a great turn out.
We would like to thank the audience for its great participation, the student development Team for its great support in supporting this event and hope to have incentivised similar student led initiatives.
Philipp Justus Delp