Last week we had the pleasure of meeting groups of secondary and 6th form students, from across Norfolk, who attended Your Future in Digital. Hosted by Norfolk Network, YFID 2011 aimed to give students hands on experience of working in the digital sector and was a massive triumph with hundreds of young hopefuls attending.

Soak were asked to hold a workshop at the event which engaged and inspired students on choosing a career in the industry, and informed on the best paths in to it.

We’ll be honest, we were slightly apprehensive about the level of enthusiasm and interest we were going to be greeted with, especially as we’d prepared a compulsory task for them (yes we had braced ourselves for a chorus of groans and “do we have to’s”). Thankfully we were proved entirely wrong and a rather nervous looking Adam, Chris and Emily soon relaxed in front of their most potentially critical audience to date.

With unemployment affecting over one million young people in the UK, we decided it would be apt to give some advice on how to succeed when attempting to find a job. Given that we’re bombarded with CVs from hopeful job seekers throughout the year, we wanted to challenge the students to think about how they can play on their own strengths and create an original online CV, which makes them stand out from an ever growing crowd.

We held two workshops which required groups of students to create digital marketing strategies for an imaginary candidate of a similar age, and with similar experience, to them.

Fuelled by the incentive of HMV vouchers and the chance to win a week’s work experience at Soak, the groups got to work and devised some truly imaginative tactics for promoting the skills and attributes of their chosen candidate to would be employers. Both workshops were a huge success and the teams considered an impressive variety of web strategies, social media channels and digital platforms to gain maximum exposure – with very little help from us we might add!

Well done to the bright sparks from City College Norwich and Great Yarmouth College who won our (probably pretty lame) voucher prizes and who we are very excited about interviewing for our work experience placement.

Hopefully in the future we will see an array of innovate CV’s hit our inbox. Remember…we can sniff out a bulk emailed CV a mile off!!

Here’s a really innovate example!