PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WEEK REFLECTION

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WEEK REFLECTION

17/10/22 - 21/10/22 (Week 8) 

Chan Jing Wen (0340480)
Professional Development Week Reflection

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The Professional Development Week prepared by Taylor's was to help us understand working and industry life better through various workshops. The workshops I attended were:

1. "Financial Literacy for Fresh Graduates" by Maybank
2. "Best Practices in Personal Branding Strategy via LinkedIn" by PwC
3. "The Power of I.P. (Intellectual Property) Monetization" by Stive Asia
4. "Storyteller: Lessons from the Father of Malaysian Animation Industry" by Filmic Entertainment
5. "Life of a Producer in the Video Production Industry" by Lokalab
6. "Post-Pandemic: Growth of Travel and Tourism Industry" by Agoda

The first workshop by Maybank was a very interesting and resourceful sharing. Investments and debts were one of the things discussed during the workshop. Before this workshop, I have little understanding on stocks and investment but I am slightly interested in it as I see a strong purpose and importance in it. Going to the talk is beneficial as it gave insights on how someone less literate in finance like me can understand the stock market by doing proper, directed research, instead of blindly going in with littler information. I especially liked the point shared by our speaker regarding how we should understand our investment behaviour before investing. If I'm an invester that is less acceptance to risk, I should be looking at how others who have the same thinking as me do investment instead of following others who may be more acceptance to risk. Also, I think it is very important for us to manage our finance as it impacts how we're able to manage emergencies. 

As I don't have an active account in Linkedin, the workshop carried out by PwC on Personal Branding was also an insightful talk. We got to understand the ins and out of LinkedIn and how we can create and maintain a professional presence there. Of course, that wasn't the only thing we focused on as the workshop educated us on how we can create our personal branding as a whole, not just on LinkedIn. Great insights were provided as we are able to understand how the industry understands and assess us through our various portfolio accounts. Although I have prepared a portfolio before for my internship, I think this talk gave me more insight on other possibilities to approach people in the industry. I definitely have a stronger understanding and better grasp on how I should prepare my portfolio and accounts before entering the industry. 

Lastly, I really enjoyed the workshop from Lokalab regarding the video production industry. As I interned in a social media agency during my internship period, I got the chance to briefly get involved in video production. Although my experience is definitely very little compared to actual video production, it gaged my interest and respect towards the industry. I really liked the opinions shared during the workshop. Although short video production for tiktok and so is different from traditional video production, we can't ignore the presence of it. When I was doing my internship, our company realised that most companies did not provide these type of video production as most either do non-video content or actual video productions. It is a market that isn't as saturated and well conceptualised yet. Thus, hearing what experts have to say on the current uproar of short videos is helpful to build a thinking on how the market for short videos can be. I think we shouldn't think short videos are "low" just because it's not as grand as traditional shoots. There is definitely something fascinating within it that makes it attract so much audiences. Understanding instead of looking down on it will help us cater to the market better and improve on the existing base that is already formed. 

In conclusion, this week was a very pack week as I had to attend a few workshops while handling my workload from major project. However, I managed to learn a lot from these industry speakers as well as from the questions my peers had discussed during each workshop. I think it is a great initiative to have us learn from people outside as it helps us think in different perspectives and see things that we might not have been able to on our own.