Future of Employability

Sigrid Berka is the Executive Director of the International Engineering Program (IEP) at the University of Rhode Island. She is also Professor of German and the Director of the German and Chinese, responsible for building academic programs with exchange partners abroad, corporate relations, and fundraising.

Sigrid is co-editor of the Journal of International Engineering Education and a certified Intercultural Development Inventory coach facilitating intercultural competency training for students.

Sigrid recently received the DAAD Alumni Association’s Excellence Award for Educational Exchange in 2019 and the URI Administrative Excellence Award in the same year. Under her leadership, the IEP was awarded NAFSA’s Senator Paul Simon Spotlight prize for innovative campus internationalisation, and the Andrew Heiskell Award by the Institute for International Education.

Jane Askin is Head of Culture and Talent at PlotBox, a cloud-based mapping and software product company, headquartered in Ballymena, Northern Ireland.

PlotBox, was named as one of the 2021 UK’s Best Workplaces, recognised by employees as an organisation that promotes a healthy workplace culture through trust, pride and camaraderie (with the company achieving an impressive average score of 95% across many focus areas, such as respect, teamwork, credibility and communication).

Jane has almost twenty years of Human Resources, Organisational Development and Learning & Development experience, gained in various roles within the public and private sectors. Jane has a passion for preserving healthy workplace culture, empowering teams to perform at their best, whilst focusing their efforts on achieving business outcomes.

Andrew Harper is a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, who currently serves as the Deputy Human Resources Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna. In this position, he manages the Human Resources portfolio for American staff as well as recruitment programmes for the two other U.S. Missions in Vienna, the U.S. Missions to the United Nations and the OSCE.

His responsibilities include supporting the HR needs of several hundred staff members in several locations throughout Austria. Previously, he served as the Deputy Human Resources Officer - Saudi Arabia.

Prior to becoming a diplomat, Andrew worked for a decade in the HR field in various capacities, including as an HR Manager for a large manufacturer and as an HR Manager for Tennessee’s largest health insurer. He also worked as a federal recruiter for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Andrew began his career as a Personnel/HR Officer in the U.S. Army.

He holds an M.A in International Commerce and Policy from George Mason University and a B.A. in Political Science and Government from East Tennessee State University.

Marcus Orlovsky is a Conference Host, speaker on creativity, education and finance, chartered accountant, and education change agent.

Director of organisation focused on helping students (all ages) and teachers/staff/leaders do the very best to enable people to lead satisfying lives.

Host of number of TEDx, and also speaker in some. Speaks on insights on matters of education, creativity, innovation and resilience.

Most of the work Marcus has done to date has been deemed 'impossible'​ beforehand. Now, tends to be referred to as 'rather obvious'!

As part of his work with people, he tends to travel extensively. He has been invited to visit schools and colleges in over 50 different countries, and presented to groups of people in some 200 towns and cities.

The purpose of the panel discussion was to get input from some of our stakeholders about the future of employability. The panel provided their responses to considering applications for internships and for full-time positions in the context of the pandemic.

Given the emergence of all-virtual environments, they are looking for applicants with demonstrated durable communication skills, and those who have an increased awareness of the different cultural and logistical challenges caused by virtual participants joining together from nations and time zones around the world.

There was discussion about the future of work that would require young people to consider ‘packaging’ simultaneous assignments with different employers that result in one full-time position (instead of the traditional full-time job), something which gives students flexibility to work on different projects at the same time, but also challenges students to identify (and promote/sell) their specific skills and interests to a broader range of employers.

There was an expressed hope for a return to in-person internships (even if these are a collection of part-time positions) because these offer students a more immersive learning experience. The panelists suggested to IAESTE not to discount the importance of immersive experiences in languages other than English, as well as an understanding that the only way to reach student audiences in some regions is to use the local language for marketing and outreach.