In conjunction with the UTAR Faculty of Business and Finance (FBF)’s virtual Industry Advisor (IA) Day, which was held on 19 March 2021, the Department of Marketing invited the IA for both Marketing and Retail Management programmes to deliver talks to FBF students via Microsoft Teams.

The first talk was conducted by IA for Marketing programme Corina Tan, who is the vice president of CSB Global Business Services from Dell Technologies; while the second talk was conducted by IA for Retail Management programme James Ng Chan Choy, who is the vice president of Greater China Danone. A total of 93 FBF students attended the talks.

With the topic “Entering the Workforce”, Tan started her virtual talk by sharing the expectations of industries from students. Further on, she shared some effective tips to enter the workforce, “It is as simple as using ‘ABCD’, which stands for A–Attitude; B–Believe; C–Challenge; and D–Develop.” Then, she further explained each of these through the talk and shared her career development experience using this ABCD.  She ended the talk by saying, “Take pride in how far you have come and have faith in how far you can go,” to exhort students to be well prepared before entering the working world.

On the other hand, Ng shared a topic titled “Owning a Meaningful Career” during the virtual talk. He stated, “Life is a long journey and career influences life, thus early career planning is important.” He also shared the Big Five Personality Traits and suggested some self-test tools that can help individuals better understand themselves. Sharing his 30 years of experience which involved successes and failures in his career life, he said, “Career is a long journey full of pitfalls and dead ends, failures and setbacks, and many untold stories behind those successes.” Before ending his talk, he advised students to embrace failures, be different, and create impacts as failures are pre-success to build strength, skills, and experience.

During the Q&A sessions, students interacted well with the speakers, and both sessions ended with a virtual group photo session.