We are excited to announce that we have officially launched our youth career readiness and entrepreneurship development community called Openfor.co/fellowship community.
About the fellowship community
Openfor.co/fellowship is a career readiness and entrepreneurship development community that targets youths from all over the world to provide training, networking, job prospects and internship opportunities. Our business goal is to find, recruit and enhance the young talents (especially those from underprivileged countries and communities) for the future hirings of our partners, clients as well as our own. Our fellowship community is also open for experienced professionals to contribute as mentors. Find out more details about our community in the following slides.
Background story of the fellowship initiative from our Co-founder & CEO Erdinc Ekinci
"Having a chance to get an internship or a working opportunity at a young age was one of the biggest desires of both me and my co-founder Yu Li Shein. We've always wanted to join such a program that could cultivate an international working culture, where we could learn, get mentorship, and kickstart our career paths. There were no such opportunities at our times.
We know how youths are essential for the growth of developing countries. Especially during this global pandemic crisis, remote working has become a reality. We saw an opportunity in this unforeseeable crisis both for us and for the future talents in the emerging countries. Besides that, we heard from many young people that, there are very few proper international interning programs in their countries and they are not getting treated very well when they join the workplace as interns. Moreover, most of the companies are demanding the experiences of fresh graduates while there aren’t proper internship opportunities for undergraduates.
This is why we launched this program. We wanted to build a community that provides proper guidance, tools, and training while bringing job opportunities from international companies for supporting their dreams."
About the career readiness and internship program.
The first batch agendas and tasks After establishing work tools and communication channels, we extracted basic agendas from the ongoing workflow of our company and assigned the tasks to the interns. In the first batch, we mostly focused on building the fellowship community and developing the career readiness/internship program. Some parts of this fellowship community are also shaped by the first batch interns.
How do we train / What do we do / Activities we do? First week,
Introducing and establishing basic work tools,
Setting up communication channels,
Socializing between interns for building team harmony,
Business basics training,
Business - job etiquette training,
Initial group team setups was based on education and experiences of our interns.
Second week,
Introducing Scrum,
Extract very basic and general agendas and tasks,
Upgrading career-interest and goal-based team setups,
Learning how to make better presentations,
Conducting group presentations.
Third week,
Project-based team setups and tasks accordingly,
Transfers between groups and assigning interconnected tasks between teams,
Individual presentations with new tools, such as preparing and presentation video, making the graphics on Canva.com for learning more efficient form of communication,
Building professional profiles for future career purpose (LinkedIn).
Forth week,
Allocating responsibility based tasks and teams accordingly.
Practicing individual and autonomous working systems.
Arranging a competition between first batch with 2 people buddy-team setup.
Networking
We also conduct weekly networking sessions within our first batch of interns in order to build strong bondings and team chemistry. Although we can’t do physical networking outside, virtual speed networking on digital platforms are variables that we practice and learn at best. This resulted in a lifelong friendship between our first batch of interns.
Mentorship Another highlight of this fellowship community is that first batch interns got one-on-one mentorship sessions with Co-founders Erdinc and Yu Li. Interns asked about career preparations, entrepreneurship journey, work life balance and so on. This is also a beautiful culture of our community.
Experiencing Sharing Outside from our working days, Erdinc and Yu Li invited experts and professionals who are working at international firms on weekends and arranged experience sharing seminars, Q&A sessions for first batch interns. In this way, first batch interns can have more exposure to international working culture and learn more about the respective fields. Competitions Myanmar Challenges Competition By Our Openfor.co/fellowship 1st Batch Interns
We are happy to announce that we successfully finished our first batch internship program last Sunday, Sep 27. We are so proud to say that they are all very talented, full of passion, easy to collaborate within teams, and ready to embark on their international career journey. It is such an honor for Openfor.co to be a kickstarter of their bright careers.
As part of our program, we did the following ** Challenges in Myanmar Competition** by focusing on current issues that are happening in Myanmar. They selected the challenging issues and prepared the presentation to solve them within such a short period of 3 days while doing their ongoing tasks too.
Openfor.co believes that Entrepreneurship is one of the biggest roles to solve Myanmar’s current challenges in order to further develop the economy and increase the competitiveness of the youths. We like to support young talents like our first batch Myanmar youths to be aware of the current issues and challenges of their surroundings and able to bring solutions with Entrepreneurship.
Creating completely virtual company culture
As a remote native company we are taking advantage of punctuality. But one of the biggest and unique challenge in our situation is curating and sustaining a culture.
Our workstation As we are lack of physical working environment due to COVID19 crisis, we needed innovate who we are going to make team member feel like tangible working environment. The way of achieving this was making everything as visual and interactive as possible and hence, we have chosen MIRO.com as the main workspace.
Final words
It was a great experience for us as a startup company to initiate a completely remote internship program. This fellowship community is a win-win situation not only for us but also for our interns. We will bring up this momentum alongside our main business as this is beneficial to our partners and Openfor.Co.
We are looking forward to your participation and Openfor.Co is always open for your collaboration.