Professional Development Week - Reflective Report

17/10/2022 - 21/10/2022 / Week 8
Avery Ong Xuan Ting / 0344462
Bachelors of Design (Hons) in Creative Multimedia
Professional Development Week - Reflective Report

---

In Week 8, we are assigned to participate in Professional Development Week for our last semester. I think this is really an interesting and great opportunity to listen some experiences from people that have already worked in the industry for many years. This helps me to develop my understanding of the area that I want to, and also there are a lot of different workshops able to join. I have participated in 7 workshop which are: 

1. Working in Entertainment Resort -Preparation and Expectations
2. Life of a Producer in the Video Production Industry" by LOKALAB
3. Storyteller: Lessons from Father of Malaysian Animation Industry"
4. Best Practices in Personal Branding Strategy via LinkedIn
5. Financial Literacy for Fresh Graduates by MAYBANK
6. SHINE Briefing Session 5 
7. Entrepreneurship in Restaurant & Catering Industry by D'Tandoor

I want to choose a few workshops that I found interesting to write my reflective report. The first one is the “Financial Literacy for Fresh Graduates" workshop. At the beginning of the workshop, the presenter asks us to fill in the risk tolerance quiz, he said that it is important to know our risk tolerance quiz before we start our investment journey. I completed the quiz, and it showed that I am a moderate person that always has a backup and won’t invest too much at once to get a high result. I do assume that I am this kind of person because I am afraid to lose everything in a moment. It will be better for me to gain my money slowly and stably. During the workshop, he mentioned that there are “Do” and “Don’t” during investment. The first “Do” is to do the investment preparation. We need to conduct a self-assessment to know how much extra money we have, and we have to create emergency funds starting from now. Next is to know our risk tolerance, as well as never sacrifice our sleep to worry when we lost money. I do agree with this, we will face a lot of struggles in our life, but I will keep moving instead of being negative. Last but not least is to develop our investment strategy, he mentioned that everyone has a different strategy, so we just need to learn slowly and find the strategy that is best for us. On the other hand, the “Don’t” which are stop spending more than you earn, stop thinking more cash brings happiness, stop making it hard to save, impatience, and unwise use of credit cards. He advised us we should use extra money to learn investment if you are fresh graduate, try to understand what we need to do first. Through this workshop, I do have open my mind for financial management, there is a lot of good advice that I can always implement during my life.

Moving on to the next workshop which is the Storyteller: Lessons from Father of Malaysian Animation Industry". I am really excited to gain my knowledge from an art-based company. The presenter shared the steps when doing an animation. First, they always look for research from real life, then move on to the sketch, draw and polish. After that they only start to scale and add the depth and visual element. He introduced us about story images as well, which is the key frame of each scene. It is different with storyboard as story images is just a key moment scene. Other than imagination, look and study for more references is definitely a crucial step. Besides that, is to do research and find more references, storytelling is an important skill for concept artist so always try to do and practice. He pointed out that communication is very important, we need to communicate and believe in our team, and know how to prioritize the task, understand which is the most urgent task. This really give me some idea to improve myself in the future.

My third workshop is about using LinkedIn to build our personal branding strategy. I know that LinkedIn is a professional social media for people to use for searching jobs, but I never tried it before because I thought it is just for after graduated and also, I didn't know that it is familiar in Malaysia too. But I think this workshop shows me how important it is for my future. The presenter mentioned that brand is a promise to people around you, which means brand is to let people know what they can expect from you, and it is a reason that they choose you to work with. Brand can show our skills, network, information and etc. By using LinkedIn, we can mention what we want in the future as well, like our values and goals. We need to keep in mind that profile is for everyone to interact with us, and a good profile photo will increase the opportunity to get job in LinkedIn. Other than that, we are advised to use first narrative to describe, like “I” and “Me”. Basically, one to two sentences about us, three to five sentences about skills, experiences and key passions. Lastly is to use 1-2 sentences to talk about future goals and how other people can engage with us. I think this is really a great advice for me as I am going to graduate this year, through LinkedIn I can increase my opportunity.

The last workshop is Entrepreneurship in Restaurant & Catering Industry by D'Tandoor. I took "Using Building Information Modelling (BIM)/3D Modelling" at first but it changed the time to Friday, which need to attend physically but I already went back to my hometown. Therefore, I changed to this workshop, but I found that it is really interesting. I took minor in culinary art, that's why I took this workshop. The presenter shared a lot of experiences, the problem he faced during his working industry. I found that culinary is very interesting too, it needs a lot of experiences to become a good chef. This workshop gives more a lot of information on the career identity itself; it actually feels like some idea for me to work on this career in the future.

Overall, this is a really interesting week to experience different workshops that can benefit me in my future. I was really happy that there are a lot of different workshops instead of just design workshop for me to participate. But I think it will be good to have this kind of activity physically so that I can be more concentrate. Really appreciate that Taylor’s provided this PDW week for students.