Story of CT

Essentially, the CareerTeam project has 3 “roots”.

1. The first and the oldest – has its roots over 20 years ago (written in 2020). Prof. Popovici can say it best as t was his initiative – he wanted to start some events called “Tuesday night evenings” (adaptation from Romanian version: “Serile de marti seara.”), to which he wanted to bring invitees from outside the university, experts in the field, who would hold alternative courses. When I was in my 4th year (2011), at some point he organized an event of the kind to which he invited an evangelist from Microsoft to present their way of doing things. I liked the idea and I kept it in mind.

In addition to that, he had another initiative called “introduction to the ETTI Faculty”. He wanted to gather high schoolers and junior students and somewhat explain what ETTI is about. The professor had talked to Ruxandra (former LSE president) and afterwards with Diana about organizing the event together with LSE and being linked with the beginnings of CT, this is how the professor’s initiative became one of the “roots”.

2. “Dialogue with celebrities“. This was a project belonging to the Sports Department during 2010-2011 in which we planned to invite people from outside the university to speak to students about how they became successful. The event counted 2 editions and it didn’t turn out to be sustainable, which is why we discontinued the project. The 2 editions gathered people like Dan Puric – attending the first edition (who filled the auditorium and who spoke for 3 hours without taking a breather and the audience listened without even blinking) and Monica Tatoiu + Mihai Sturzu and some other successful people – some photos here.

Dialogue with celebrities would have probably been an interesting project… the concept was nice, but our lack of experience showed. We didn’t have an invitee profile (we practically accepted anyone who was willing to attend), we didn’t have a marketing or branding strategy, not to mention a budget. Anyway, we didn’t even have a clear direction or an outcome we expected from this project. We did this out of passion and because we were a team full of energy – if we enjoyed an evening at the dorms with a glass of wine (which happened almost every evening 😃) and we came up with an idea, the next day we would implement it.

And with Dialogue with celebrities, without thinking too much about it, we assumed that everyone would want to be a speaker in ETTI, but also that everyone would try to squeeze in to see the celebrities and to ask questions. Well, things didn’t go as planned, but we learnt a lot from this experience.

3. The third root was an experience I went through after graduating when I tried to find a job and I noticed that even though I had applied to a lot of companies, no one called me. First of all, it was a very hard, depressing and boring period of time because each recruiting website or company required a specific CV format which was very time-consuming. And assembling a highly professional CV can take 2 to 3 days. So losing so much time only to find that no one even goes through it is very frustrating. At that time LinkedIn wasn’t popular in Romania, so I spent time editing a lot of CVs and I found myself discouraged that I would not find a job. Fortunately, the waiting time was of just 2 weeks, but afterwards, I thought that everyone surely goes through this. So I decided to create a platform to solve the problem and to invite other graduates to speak about how they started out their professional careers. Basically, I started to wish to help students understand what happens after graduation. (…and 10 years after graduation I found myself still doing that – check here my project Career Path)

This whole thing (the third root) happened in the summer of 2012 and this coincided with the moment when the professor was discussing with my good friends and colleagues in LSE – Ruxandra& Diana about his initiative (– connection with the first root) in the university. And seeing as we had stopped organizing Dialogue with celebrities (— connection with the first root), we talked about organizing together a workshop with an invitee of Mr. Popovici.

As the leader of the Sports Department, I took over the direct communication with the invitee (an ETTI graduate who had worked at Orange, Vodafone and Telekom and who at the time had his own company – a recruiting agency) and I let him decide on the theme and name of the workshop. So he chose “Your Career” (adaptation from Romanian version: “Cariera ta“) and talked about how to write a professional CV. We already had a well-trained organizing team (part of Sports Department, coordinated by my successor at that moment – Irina and other senior members such as Bogdan, Ana and Andreea; this team coincided with another sub-team of the Sports Department which handled our student magazine, Tronica) from Dialogue with celebrities, the IT part was being handled by myself and Marian (who was a member of the Sports Department at the time, but later became the coordinator of the Graphics & Design Department) handled design so we moved fast and the next day found us with a conference classroom booked, a logo, a poster and a website for the event, all ready to go and we let the process of registration for the event take its course. Like any other project of the Sports Department, we had a delegate who acted as Project Manager for this “small project”, PM who in a short time would have become the CT Coordinator (namely Ana).

Fortunately, it was very easy to shift our focus from organizing sports events to professional events, because we already had experience with registration flow, participants check-in, posters, follow-up newsletters, websites etc.

We had planned that after that workshop to invite other people and to have a different name for it each time, but we lacked inspiration for the second edition and we realized that it would have been too complicated to create another logo, another poster, another website and so on, so we obviously called it “Your Career” v2. 😃

As I said above, I wanted to help students to have a better understanding of what happens after university and graduation so for the second edition a colleague of mine from Orange (namely Irina) acted as a speaker. She was always an inspiring person to me and had also graduated from ETTI, so who else would have been a better fit to share with the students a good career story (?).

And that’s about all for the first semester of the 2012-2013 academic year. Basically, this is how the project started.

After two editions we noticed that such an event can be very popular so we started thinking about ways to make it sustainable. In parallel with this, there were many discussions with Prof. Popovici about his proposals to bring speakers to the event. We also started to receive requests from other companies who wanted to do something similar to my colleague’s presentation. So basically in the first year, the project exploded.

The demand was very high and so was its popularity, and having a very well put together team we could afford to do practically anything. Only in the second semester of the same year, the project evolved from inviting some graduates to speak to the students about what happens after graduation to…

• The CT Concept

CareerTeam is an LSE project which plans to support students in their professional development process, to understand what career suits them and to help companies extend their teams with the most suitable (not necessarily the best) people.

• The CT Solution

Employers (from start-ups to corporations) should engage in targeted recruitment – to recruit specialists directly from the source – juniors from profile universities or seniors from alumni communities. In this way, they manage their ratio of the number of applications and interviews better. Specialists can develop better in communities, actively participating in presentations on employer opportunities to better understand businesses or to exchange knowledge.

• Means of concept implementation (activities)

Conferences, Open Days, Workshops, Training Centers, Surveys, Assessment Centres, Hiring Tournaments, Online tests, Extracurricular courses, International opportunities (internships, master programs, work & travel).

• CT philosophy

We spend 10 hours per day working. No matter if we’re familists or workaholics, our job plays a very important role in our lives – the health and happiness of ourselves and of those around us depend, more or less, directly on what we do as a job. If we all had a job that we were happy doing, we would be happier. If employers had happier people, they would see a better change in efficiency and they would be happier. If everyone was happier, we would live in a better society.

The “CT philosophy” was the main phrase I used to pitch the project in front of partners and based on this idea I grew my own career and tried to inspire others.

After I handed over the leadership of the project, it continued for a few years under the leadership of a very energetic and skilled team (the most prominent being Andreea – my successor as executive coordinator and Otilia).

CareerTeam ultimately became the most complex project that LSE has ever developed (as of July 2019).

Unfortunately (and I am truly sorry this happened and I could not prevent it), the project was discontinued due to 2 reasons:

• Lack of support from the ETTI faculty; the faculty’s board refused to collaborate further with LSE. My personal understanding (and it’s just an opinion because the team never received an explanation for that) is that the faculty’s board saw CareerTeam as a competitor rather than an ally. And this is really sad (but hey, the game is not over yet).
• Lack of experience of the new generations. As projects become more and more complex and the generations are changed, it is harder to propagate knowledge and motivation; and I believe the project could have been successfully continued even without the support of the faculty’s board – through other activities than local events (so this is while I let it go and decided one day to start over a new project based on CT philosophy). I have extensively talked about that here.