This time of year, I’m always thinking about school career day events. We see increased activity from our existing subscribers and new inquiries throughout the US. And not only about our software, but general questions about putting on career day events. It got me thinking…
Many of you have the same questions, concerns, and struggles when you are putting on your events. And you probably don’t even realize there is a nation-wide community of people with the same struggles.
Since we started our career day scheduling software company over 20 years ago, I have had the privilege to help many schools and attend numerous career days, and I have kept notes on my observations, career day ‘gotchas’, and software changes we needed to make over time (and the reason we made them).
So I decided I’m going to start sending out emails every couple weeks at the beginning of the year with some tidbits of info I have picked up over the years. This isn’t about selling the software – this is really about answering some of the questions I have heard, discussing some of the best practices I have seen, and hopefully helping those out who are new to scheduling career day events or want to enhance what they do. If career day events are not your cup of tea, then feel free to unsubscribe and you won’t get any more of these emails, no hard feelings. But if you choose to stay, I’ll send out some stories and lessons I have picked up since I started working with career days. And I’d love to hear your feedback – many of you have more context and great ideas – and I’d love to share those thoughts with everyone.
On the subject of context, I figured I’d give a quick story of how I got started with career days for those of you who don’t know. I promise to keep it short!
I’m a techie by nature and by education (electrical engineering). I specialized in hardware (microchip) design and tinkered in software. My wife got a new job as an elementary teacher in Frisco, Texas. One day, she came home and said she joined the career day committee. Then she said they were putting the schedules together by using pieces of paper with student names and their careers, and spending a good few weeks matching it all up just to create the schedule (sound familiar?). And finally she said she told everyone I was a ‘tech guy’ and I’d write her some kind of software to fix the problem.
So she came home and said I ‘had’ to build something. She was expecting a smart spreadsheet or something, but I decided to build an actual piece of software. Our first software worked, but it wasn’t quite web based. I literally had to drag a mid tower computer around to show people the software.
Then, a light bulb went off! I converted everything to a web based application. Two software generations, 15 States, and 20 years later, here we are!
I hope you enjoyed my trip down memory lane! Have a great holiday season, and I hope you enjoy my emails to come!
– Scott