 Okay, so welcome to this brief overview of the leeway and how you can use it to help you meet some of your career goals and also find some supports to help you with that. I just want to quickly do a land acknowledgement to remind us all that we are on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Slewa Tooth and Squamish Nation. Sorry, excuse me. For myself, I also take a minute to reflect on my relationship to the land. I'm a settler here on these lands, and if you wish, you can take a moment to reflect your own relationship to the land. So we are from the career development and work into graded learning office. For those of you joining us on Zoom, we are located inside student services, which is a cross firm reception on the main floor. And you can also reach us by email. I'll put all the contacts up at the end. We help with some of the following with career advising. That would include finding jobs and opportunities, search strategies for these, resume cover letter and portfolio review. This is something we can have a look at yours and give you some feedback on. We also have resources for these, networking strategies, which I'll cover a little bit of today. But if you're just not quite sure how to get started with that, we also put on events like these career related events and programming that you'll see throughout the year. And we also co-manage the leeway with the alumni office. So that's what we're here to talk about today. The leeway is something that started a few years ago. And it was actually started by the alumni office here at Emily Carr. And we joined them maybe about a year after they launched it for alumni. And when we had a look at what the platform could do, one of the reasons that we wanted to join is because it helped us meet some of our goals. It was the whole point of this platform is that it was created to help students in their career goals, also to foster community building between the people that are signed up for the leeway, especially between students and alumni. It helps connect you to alumni for networking and also to other students for collaboration. Depending on what majors you're in, you may at times be thinking, oh, I wish I could connect with an animation student for this project I want to do that is a little outside of my practice. So you can use it for that too. We also want to increase student agency. So this puts the tools in your hands to be able to act on your own behalf. That's what we mean by that. We're here to help, but it's better if we can empower you to help yourselves too. We also wanted to centralize some of the tools in one place for career development and also the resources. So who is on the platform? Basically students, alumni, faculty and staff. That is the community that we're talking about. We also have potential employers on there and when they sign up, we usually take a moment to vet them a little bit because we don't just want anybody on there and we will talk a little bit more about that in a minute. So now I'm going to hand it over to Jeff. He's the expert on this to talk about walking through the steps for signing up. Thanks, Kathleen. So when you go to the site, you're going to come right up from the leeway.ca. You'll see the join now button at the top. Then you're going to be creating an account. So when you go through, you're going to have an affiliation as a student with your email and password. Once you select student, you'll see more options will drop down. If you do use your Emily Carr email address when signing up, verification is faster. If we can't identify you due to a chosen name, you will get an email to clarify, you'll get a notification, but you're also welcome to just send us an email to co-op. We're on top of that. You'll get approved. You can use a chosen name. You can use any name that you feel your chosen name when signing up for the platform. So once you're filling in your basic profile, the system will walk you through the steps. You'll just continue and receive a verification email with a link to click. When you click through the link, you'll be prompted to further populate your account. How are you willing to help? As a student, collaboration is your only option. Collaboration, just a note, is not working for free for an employer. And we may talk a little bit more about that. But remember, when you're filling this in, when you transition to alumni, you'll be able to think about where you can offer support. Exactly. And you'll see that. So when you're seeking help, you'll see all the options are actually clicked on. But we think that you should click off really. Try to think about where you want mentorship from an alumni. Hit continue. Our office will approve your account. You'll receive a notification within three business days that you'll be able to sign back in. Then you can add all your other info. This was where you may add experiences like employment or project works. Just to give other members a sense of your practice, so that collaboration will be more fulfilling. They can really connect with you, where you are in your practice. Under seeking mentorship, this is where you can edit to reflect your current needs as a student, where you are, again, in your practice. This can be changed as you move along and as you may discover new things about your practice. And this just helps you to connect with the right mentors. These mentors will see who you are and just be able to identify if they can help you. Okay. The majority of hints. Just to go through really quickly. I should tell you, you do not need to update your profile or complete your profile to get to the job board. If you want to just fill in basic information, you can always come back at a later time to update, better reflect your mentorship needs or your practice or your work history. Your educational background previous to Emily Carr, but really just to enter the job board, if you want to just get basic stuff up, that's absolutely fine. So the job board, this is where most people are on the leeway. You'll see on the left-hand side, arts work, the opportunity board. This is where we source jobs for alumni and students, calls for residents, sorry, calls for artists, residences, jobs on campus, volunteer opportunities. These should be for registered nonprofits. There won't be a lot on the site, but we do like to have the occasional opportunity that can help with your practice or that you can identify really is within what you, where you are. The postings on the page, these positions are either self-posted by employers who sign up or they're sourced by us in the office through indeed postings or Alliance for the Arts postings, just looking them up through Google. I have a bunch of ways I find things that are related to your degree. These should be paid. There is a new BC Wage Transparency Act as of November 1st this year, which requires that all postings on public job boards have a range of remuneration, a range of pay. This really does increase agency, not just for you as students, but as you move into your career. This is a really important step that the government took. So we're big fans of this and this should be reflected on posts on our job board as well. You will find a few bill paying jobs on the site, but really we're looking for jobs related to your degree area. But occasionally we know that students are looking for jobs maybe at the bank who were soup company around the corner, but this is really not what arts work is for. So there are other sites for that, but really we can help with that as well, but that's not really the focus of arts work itself. So we're going to look at a quick illustrator posting. I want you to really note the closing dates which are just at the top of the posting over there, as well as the application instructions. This is important for me to really just stick to this point for a second. You will see an apply button right there. However, the application instructions are very often included in the body of the posting and it's really important that you follow those instructions. I do also see that on posts outside of the arts work job board, including indeed, it's really good that you read through, follow the exact instructions. I just want to go through a couple things in terms of vetting and limitations of use, your liability. We do vet jobs as much as we possibly can in this office, but as it says here, users assume liability just like any other job board, and there is a resource on the leeway that Shislaine will point out in a few minutes, but really we just want you to know that these are sophisticated scams these days. We are a resource to you. You can contact us for any, if you have any questions, if you have a bad feeling. Shislaine, did you want to add to this for a... Yeah, the only thing I would add is that it's not that we're sloppy about checking. It's that the scams get more sophisticated all the time and we've been fooled ourselves. People create whole websites and things for a job scam. How did we find out about the job scam? A student came and told us that... So there's some red flags that if someone offers to transfer money to you before you've even started work, that's weird. If someone's messaging you constantly on your cell phone, that's weird. If you just have any kind of feeling in your gut after applying for something that it seems a little off to you, that's what we're here for. Please come see us. Like, flag it for us. Say, you know, I know this was on ArtsWorks, but we could never 100% guarantee that we caught everything. So when you use it, it's actually at your own risk. We do our best. We don't want anyone to be scammed. Heck no, but they have slipped by us before. So just bear that in mind. Yeah, as Shislaine says, we really do appreciate you coming to us with any of your concerns, any of these red flags. You're kind of a part of us ensuring that the job board is clean. Anyway, Shislaine, I'm going to pass it back. She's going to go through a demo. I'm going to do a demo and just kind of walk you through the platform. I'll just get my chair ready. Okay, so let's some exit from this. So here's what it looks like when you're on the landing page. It kind of looks like a Facebook page. So there is like a feed here in the middle on some highlights from the job border here. We already showed you where to find ArtsWork. And just a couple of things that you should know. So here at the bottom of the left hand menu is the resources section. There we go. So we've tried to organize them as best we can. The job scam information, there is a resource here. So if you want more info about that, that's where that is. If you're just not sure what to look for in terms of red flags. The videos of previous presentations is a really good section full of resources. I think that the interviews 101 is a really good presentation. If you get called for an interview, I don't know if this happens to you where they're like, oh, can you come tomorrow morning at eight? And you're like, oh, geez, I have to prepare. And you can come and see us in the career office. You can make an appointment to do interview prep. But it's pretty hard to get in. Like, you know, certainly you can't get in before 8am the next day. So you could always watch this video before you go to an interview to help you understand how best to prepare. The resume and cover letter one is really good. I usually recommend people watch this before they make an appointment to have their resume reviewed, because it just makes our time in the office more, we can get more focused and strategic, because you can apply all the information from this video to your current documents. If you're interested in work integrated learning, that there's a video info session about that. And a few other things in here, the search strategies is really good. That's just kind of like some approaches that you can take for looking for jobs. And if you're interested in working in the BC film industry, there's jobs in all majors in that field. So you could watch that one. Anyway, that's all I'll do there. If I go back to resources here, a couple more I wouldn't mind mentioning. This alumni career pathways series is really good. We put these together in partnership with the alumni office where it's panels of alumni in different areas of focus. You can see them all here. And basically just to try and demystify career pathways for students, what these alumni's careers looked like, like how they left school and then got to where they are now, what they learned, what they wish they'd known, what was the big aha moment for them, things like that. And there's going to be three more going up here soon that just happened this November. So those are really good videos to check out. Also here in the career launch events, that's a career focused week that we put on out of our office last spring. And this first one, a career in the creative industries alumni panel is a little bit like those pathways series, but a really, really good alumni panel. And there's a few more in here that are were offered that week that are great. If they are appropriate for your practice. I think that's it. There's a bit of info here on Will Co-op, if that's something you're interested in. And right here are the PDF versions. If you prefer seeing things in print, they're all right here. And we included a mural pricing guideline in here just because that was an area that students were struggling with a little bit. They didn't really know what to price a mural at if they were asked or approached to do one. And they were probably in most cases very much underpricing themselves. Okay. So let's go back to the main page. I'm just going to do a quick example of how to find an alumni mentor. Is that something that interests people? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you really want to find someone in a targeted way. And you can click this mentoring tab, but I don't like the way the system does that. Feel free. Like if you do click this one, what it does is it starts showing you mentorship topics. And I think it is better to actually be able to filter by alumni and the area they graduated in. Because if you're an industrial design, you're probably looking for an alumni that graduated in industrial design. Right? So this is how you do that. You click on the directory. And it pretty much shows you every single person signed up for the leeway. And what is it now? Like 36. Oh wait, I have to refresh here. Hang on. It has done a previous filtering thing on me. And there we go. Okay. So it's like 36 something, 100 people. And this is everybody registered for the leeway. Okay. So the next thing you want to do is start filtering this list because you don't want to have to review that many people's profiles. So remember that when you Jeff said when you signed up, you pick an affiliation, which is student. Now you want to filter by the affiliation alumni. Okay. So you just click on that and then it will filter. Incidentally, if you were looking to collaborate with students in other majors, you could click student here too. And then put in the major because that does happen sometimes where you're like, oh, I wish I could find a student in like animation that I could work with. Okay. So now we have just over a thousand alumni registered on the leeway. And I want to further, I said industrial design, let's do that. So I'm going to further filter. So you just go here to the name of the school. And you can filter by degree, but it's even more helpful to filter by major. So all the majors would be listed here. And I'm just going to for the sake of this filter by industrial design. Okay. But you can filter by any major. So now I have a much smaller list, 107 alumni that graduated in industrial design. All of the people that have this green tab here that says willing to help, that means that they have identified themselves as willing to provide help to a student. So these are the people you want to look at. For people that don't have that banner, please don't bother them. They are not what they don't want to do that right now. And there could be many reasons for that at different times of people's careers. But even if you see someone that seems super juicy, resist the temptation to start bugging that person, because they'll probably just leave the leeway. Okay. So now what you want to do, you don't want to be DMing like 100 people and trying to keep track of that. I think the next best step is to start researching some of these folks that have identified themselves with the green willing to help banner. So I would do that by just clicking into them and seeing what they have about themselves. So remember when Jeff was saying earlier, you don't have to fully populate your profile in order to use the system. Here's somebody who didn't fully populate their profile. And that's fine. No big deal. But it's hard for you to find out more information about them and their practice and determine if they're a good fit for you. So what I would recommend is taking this person's name and just doing some research on them outside of the leeway, just using Google, see if you can find their website, maybe LinkedIn. If you really can't find them, you may want to go on to somebody else who you can determine is a good fit for the information you're looking for. You shouldn't really get all of your support from one person. So I would be a little bit strategic. You just don't want to burn people out. But Claudia has identified over here, these are all the things that she is willing to help with. Introduction to connections, open doors within industry. Isn't that great? Answer industry specific questions. Maybe you're like, I don't really know what this career looks like in the real world. I'm only learning the academic side of things and the practice side of things. I need some practical information about how the industry works. This is something that this person's identified themselves as willing to share. So pay attention to what they've said. But she's also seeking help. She only graduated four years ago. So it's a constant cycle. You never get to that point where you're like, yeah, I know what all, I don't need any help. So even early career, you might still want to find an alumni that's more senior to you after you've graduated. You could be two years out and be like, I still want to find a mentor. And that is what is great about the platform is that it connects alumni to alumni as well. After you've done your shopping around and research on people, I wouldn't really reach out to more than about two people at once, just so that you can take the time to have a little bit of an exchange there. And then that could naturally come to an end. That's fine. Maybe you meet up with them once and have a coffee and go through a few things, get some advice, show them your portfolio, and then you can look for other people that might be able to they might even have contacts in their industry that they connect you with. And that's great. You can say to these people, well, what I'm really trying to do is see if I can find an internship for the summer between third and fourth year. And they might say, oh, I know who has those. So not only are you getting advice from them specifically, but also their network. See this introduction to connections. So this is going to be really important to your career development moving forward. Okay. So if you decided that's who you want, you can click on this button here request help and that'll send them a message through the system. I do think it's good to do it this way because this validates you to them. They don't have any old person could email them and say, oh, yeah, I'm a student and they have no way of checking that. So they know that you're on the leeway. So you're definitely part of the Emily Carr community, but I will show you as well. That's their email down at the bottom here. And what I usually say is that you could request help. If you don't hear back from them, you could follow up with an email that's direct and say, oh, I sent you a request for help through the leeway, but I didn't hear back. Maybe you're really busy. Do you have a question? Practically, the question was, what's the difference between requesting mentoring or requesting help? Practically, I don't think there's any difference. I'm not really sure why the system separates it out like that because even if you just met them once, it is mini mentorship. Like it's half an hour of mentorship, right? My guess is that the platform sees mentorship as maybe more of an ongoing relationship like you're taken on as a mentor and it's ongoing. But honestly, I think you could do either. And some relationships when you connect for advice are going to, you're just going to really click with the person and your practices are going to be aligned and the relationship would naturally morph into something that is ongoing and others, people might be quite transactional. It might be kind of short. They'll give you their advice. They're busy. They don't have time and that's fine. You want to let them take your cues from the alumni as to what and how much capacity they have for support, right? I'll talk about that again in a minute. So just to go back for one second, I'm just going to show one more example. So see you decided you looked at Claudia. You couldn't find much info. So you went to the next person. Now, there's a lot more populated in this person's profile. So that's when you can start to see, oh, you know, it might be helpful if I populate mine so that if I request help, this person may go on the system and check me out before they say yes. So it is kind of good to have a little bit, you know, and like Jeff said, you don't have to do that just to get on the platform. But you may want to take a minute to do it before you start asking for help. And again, this is what they're willing to help a little bit less than the other person. So don't go asking for things that aren't here. You know, you want to and do take a moment to research this person's practice, you know, I think this person, yeah, they have a website. So go to their website. You don't want to come. There's this expression, Irish expressions, which says you don't want to come with one arm longer than the other, which basically means it shouldn't be all take, take, take from you and all give from them. You show them that you're ready. You did some research. You did them the courtesy of finding out a little bit about their practice. You know, this isn't a faculty member that you have paid to teach you. This is someone who's giving of their own free time and generosity. Okay, so that is the end of my demo. Did I forget anything, Jeff? I don't think I did. Just going to go quickly back to our presentation and pick up where we left off. I sort of touched on this a little bit. It's really a couple of things to keep in mind in terms of mentor mentee, let's say etiquette. You do want to be very mindful of how much you're asking someone to help you and their time. Let them take the lead on that. You definitely, if you've met up for coffee with an alumni, you want to keep an eye on the time at the half hour point, you really should say, oh, we're half an hour in. I just want to make sure I want to be, make sure I'm not taking up too much of your time. And if they say, oh no, that's okay, I have an hour, then you can keep going. Right? The last thing you want, and you don't want to be sending nonstop emails, oh, I have another question. Oh, I have another question. Because you don't want an alumni to see your name in their inbox and go, oh, what now? Like, so just be aware of that, okay? You can always move on to somebody else, so you're not burning one person out, okay? Check in with them about their capacity. You want to make sure you're appreciative because they're doing this unpaid of their own generosity. And this is just a small thing. Because you're expanding your professional network by connecting with these folks, you want to be professional. This is not the time to start like dishing the dirt on some horrible faculty member. Even if they start it, I wouldn't go there. Like, this is someone who could be in a position to recommend you for a job or even hire you yourself. It's a small town. So the last thing you want is for them to have an impression of you that you are unprofessional. Just take the high road, resist the temptation as tempting as it may be. Have those conversations with your current students if you want to like trash people. And again, be prepared. Do a little bit of research and know what it is that you want to know. You know, have your questions ready. Right? The other thing is that we can help you get prepared. So if you're like, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to reach out to some alumni. And then you're like, I don't even know. What do I write in my reach out? Like, I don't even know what to say. You can always make a one-on-one advising appointment with me. I'm the advisor for undergrads for careers. And we could go through some language together and some approaches if you feel nervous about that. If you don't go for it. But if you feel like you just want to be like, is this right? Am I doing this right? We can be the sounding board for that. That is the end of my presentation. This is us and our contact details. Please follow as we put events and jobs up on our Instagram. And also, if you want a copy of this PowerPoint, you can email us at that email co-op at ecuad.ca. And we can email you a copy of these slides if you want them. No problem there. Any questions in the room? Was this good? Good things to learn? Okay. Jeff, any questions online? No. Okay. Well, then I guess we can stop the recording.