You've been with the Institute for five years. What activities do you offer students within Career Services and what are your objectives?
Benefiting from the Institute's good reputation is very useful but not enough. That's why all our activities are aimed at making our students effective and independent in their job search. To do this, we offer several types of support such as individual advice and coaching sessions, mock interviews or CV checks. We also organise workshops on job search techniques tailored to International Geneva, themed Career Days, individual presentations by organisations, visits to our partners and participation in external Career Fairs. We also manage the MOVETIA grants for internships abroad and make our partners' job offers available on our internal portal. We also provide administrative support for work permit procedures for our non-Swiss students.
How are you organised within the department to best meet students' needs?
There are three of us, each with a specific career adviser role, and one student assistant. I manage external relations and external student recruitment. Kevin Merkelz manages events and the Movetia grant. Tiffany Palmer is in charge of communications and internal student recruitment and Camila Bunge provides administrative support as well as looking after the newsletter. The common denominator between Tiffany, Kevin and myself is the advice and coaching meetings. The workshops, CV checks and mock interviews are run by Tiffany and Kevin.
What is the feedback from the students?
I have to admit without arrogance that their feedback is excellent. We are lucky to have students who are extremely grateful for all the services we provide. We often receive warm messages of thanks or hugs when they pass us on campus. Some even stay in touch with us after their studies. For the 2023-2024 academic year, the students who responded to our surveys recommend our workshops 100% and our one-to-one appointments 99.2%. It's been a good year!
How do you measure the quality of your services and what is your approach to improving quality?
After each of our "services", a small survey is sent to the students. The general attitude of our service is always "work and progress". Even if the feedback is excellent, we take all comments seriously and re-evaluate our services between each semester. Every summer we hold a retreat where we put everything on the table and look at what we're keeping for the new year, what we won't be doing any more and what we can improve. It's also a time to come up with new ideas for the next school year or two.