Post-secondary students at Ontario colleges and universities are facing a tough job market as the COVID-19 pandemic endures. Government-mandated stay-at-home orders and other preventative measures have limited the rate of available summer work opportunities, and as a result, students are experiencing more difficulty than previous years in securing placements in their fields. 

Professors around George Brown College (GBC) Centre for Business are trying to come up with new and innovative ways to help students navigate through these challenges. 

“Last semester, a lot of students actually deferred their experiential learning semesters because of not being able to find a good match or a good opportunity for their internship programs,” says Elif Hiz, Strategic Relationship Marketing (B409) professor at GBC. “There is a need to look for alternative opportunities just because of the limited number of internship options available in the market.”

Hiz has implemented alternative experiential learning options within the Strategic Relationship Marketing (B409) program in efforts to assist her students in securing work experiences that suit their particular interests. Working in portfolio-assigned opportunities set up by Hiz herself, students will have the chance to tackle business problems in team settings of two to six people. 

“Students will be tackling it as a group for each business challenge that they have with those businesses. The faculty will be their mentor throughout that process, so whenever there is a challenge, whenever there is a review needed, faculty will be that go-to person,” says Hiz. 

“Mainly the difference is that the faculty members are taking this intermediary role to do the outreach and kind of collect and create a portfolio of business challenges, using either their own network or using some other platforms on behalf of the students.”

Several programs already tried out this option in the Summer 2020 semester, including the Sport and Event Marketing (B400) post-graduate program, says Hiz. Due to positive student feedback, GBC is now trying to integrate this experiential learning method into other programs around the college. 

“They really tried to figure it out as it went as time passed by. Now, we’re really giving it a structure and defining the boundaries and expanding it to multiple programs and not only limited to the few programs that initially tested this out,” says Hiz. “The feedback we received from those programs, from some of the students that took the academic work term option within those programs, they were really happy. The feedback was really positive, that’s why this was an idea to be explored further.”

With one main faculty contact assigned to each program within the Centre for Business, this contact will work closely alongside student groups to ensure all roles and expectations are being fulfilled. 

Although this portfolio of opportunities are unpaid due to their collaborative team-nature, Hiz says it will be a good way to provide an equal opportunity to all students, especially international students who are currently disadvantaged by COVID-19 and unable to travel to Canada.