Development of a "SmartConnect" platform for early awareness of students employability towards digital industry

Abstract

One of the recent popular approaches of promoting products and creating sales is to leverage the power of the Internet and social media. Some courses have a number of sharing on techniques and skills that online advocates write blogs about products and services to their audiences through social media. This project aims to nurture and help students to identify their interests and strengthen their employability in digital industry through a proposed platform "SmartConnect", where we will connect their course project deliverables with their reflections and gain feedback and feed-forward from various people like peer classmates, instructors/tutors, professionals or potential employers, and alumni. An ontology analysis tool is used to analyze their reflections and collected feedback/feed-forward comments, and to compare the existing jobs in the market in order to help students understand their ability and "discover" themselves whether their attitudes and accomplishments in the SmartConnect platform have been "connected" to any potential employers or intern supervisors who are interested to provide opportunities to ease the transition from education into employment. It was piloted in two IS core courses (IS2502 Social Media and Social Networking and IS4246 Digital Marketing and CRM) in Semester B 2014/15 and welcomed by students who looked for continuous support for their online presence and system run till semester A 2015/16.