One of the required courses for grade 10 students is Planning 10 which includes learning about career planning, work safety, personal development and smart goals. A big part of this course is doing a job shadow with a career you find interesting and or something you want to do when you’re older. I have no idea what I want to do when I’m older, NO IDEA, I know a couple people who literally have their careers planned out but I literally don’t know what path I want to follow.
When doing some brainstorming for the job shadow, I was thinking I’d do something like anthropology, neurophysiology, nursing, entrepreneurship etc. To brainstorm some of our ideas, we came up with a call list of people we were going to call or email to ask if we could job shadow them. We also came up with a chart of job ideas we might be interested in.
After brainstorming I decided to contact someone I know who is an entrepreneur for a job shadow. Once she said yes I planned a date and was ready for the job shadow!
I ended up job shadowing Kirsten, the founder of ePACT, a company that has created a new way to stay connected to your family in case of an emergency. It’s an online server where you can do all of your safety and security forms for your family. What I found super interesting is how the company was created to solve a problem that one of her friends faced when the earthquake hit Japan in 2011. Her friend was separated from her children for 3 days following the earthquake. This kind of relates back to our Blue Sky projects of finding a solution to a problem that someone has and solving it. This involves not necessarily always coming up with a completely new idea but fixing the older one to make a better more usable version.
I did the job shadow in the afternoon and started around 1pm in the afternoon and went until around 5pm. As Kirsten is the co-CEO of the company, it was really cool to see all the different roles of the people who worked at her office. It gave me the opportunity to look at more than one career path. Throughout the day I was able to experience a real day in the office and was given a description of each career area including accounting, customer experience, technology officer, sales, customer success, marketing and developers.
The first part of the day I was given a tour around the office where I was shown where everything was and which offices were for which people. The office was very good and didn’t seem like a typical office of what many would expect. Instead, it was really homey and had a lot of fun games and toys around the office including nerf guns!!
I also got to sit in on one of the business meetings between Kirsten and the marketing and sales people. This was very interesting and I learned a lot about what strategies the company uses to get new clients. ePACT is in over 142 countries which is amazing as the company only started about 7 years ago. Many sports teams, community centres and families use Epact and it has made their lives so much easier. Learning about how the company worked was very captivating and gave me a real view on what it would be like to work for a technology based company.
Another thing I did while at the job shadow was ask Kirsten questions about her job and the steps she went through to have her company become what it is today. I prepared some questions beforehand to ask and the overall interview went really well. One thing I found really inspiring from the interview was when she talked about I also recorded the interview which I made into a short podcast. This is the podcast I made:
After having this experience of this job shadow, I think it has opened my eyes to jobs in a different career path that I might not have considered before this job shadow. Before this job shadow, I wasn’t really sure of the importance of it in the Planning 10 curriculum. However, for any students who are not sure what they would like to pursue, this is a really beneficial experience. PLP has definitely been an influence to the career path I might pursue, as I have more of an interest to go into an area that would potentially be more technology based. I still have no idea what I want to do for a job in the future but hopefully over the next couple of years in high school I will have made more of a decision taking my job shadow into consideration.