The topic of the
3-day training held in Eger, Hungary was the use of social media to raise
the prestige of VET. The main goal of the training was to demonstrate
what social media interfaces exist, which ones we use, which our target groups
use, and through which platforms we can communicate most effectively. We talked
about content sharing, its advantages and disadvantages. We
tried to structure the training in such a way that it would give all our
partners new ideas and tips, be a little playful and everyone could express
their own opinion on behalf of their organization.
Summary
After welcoming the partners, the opening speech was
given by Sándor Pál File, Secretary General of Heves County Chamber of Commerce
and Industry, who gave a
comprehensive and detailed presentation on the topic of the economic situation
of Heves county.
After the thorough introduction and discussing the agenda Renáta Nagy, VET advisor of HKIK gave a quick repetition about the main role and tasks of the chamber and how it is related to
vocational education and training. Shortly after, she gave a presentation
about the use of social media at HKIK, about what social media platforms they
use, what kind of contents they post, who they want to target with the contents
they share, who are their target audiences on the various social media channels.
She presented the main initiatives recently created
by the chamber on social media platforms, the aim of which was to reach and
attract the attention of as many students as possible.
Afterwards, Petra Szerencsi, the chamber's project
coordinator spoke about the chamber's main ongoing projects, first highlighting
the LIFE-IP North-HU-Trans project, which aims to help the country's largest
power plant transition to decarbonization, as well as to support local
businesses that are suppliers of the Mátra Power Plant with mentoring programs,
various trainings and retrainings. Furthermore, she covered the chamber's
partnership participation in two projects, the aim of which is promotion and
monitoring of environmental sustainability in vocational training and raising
awareness on effective waste management.
After the project presentations, she talked about
social media use in general, what social media actually is, what it is about,
what its purpose is, what platforms are present in our lives. With the help of
a diagram from this year, she illustrated the
distribution of the communication channels most often used by the 16-64 age
group who use the Internet. She also talked about what the different social
media channels are for, what they can be used for, what their goals are, who
are the main users, who are the target groups, what content can be shared and
posted. A comparison of these fairly well reflected the differences and
similarities between the platforms quite well. We were able to learn a lot
about content creation, what a good content is, what to pay attention to when
sharing contents. We were able to get to know useful sites for making posts, a great
content creator has been introduced. The differences between different
generations were precisely outlined in digital and technological development,
communication, keeping in touch, interests and many other topics related to
social media. We got a lot of new and even more useful information about
Generation Z, such as why they use different social media platforms than their
parents, or when and for what they use each platform, or what kind of contents they
post and share the most. She provided us with personal advice and suggestions,
as well as useful tips on how we adults can reach and involve young people or
students. At the end of her presentation, she showed us a very good and
illustrative video on the topic of TikTok for Businesses: Who,
What, and Why for Marketers. After that, we played a little Kahoot! as a
diversion where of course there were questions about social media and
vocational education and training. After a hearty lunch, the group took part in a
guided factory visit at the EMERSON company, where after a short company presentation,
we were divided into two groups and could see the company's production
activities. We ended the day with a delicious dinner in one of
Eger's most visited restaurants, the HBH restaurant, which was preceded by a
short but all the more interesting guided city tour.
Following the
first day, the next training session was held by Gergely Tóth, who
headed the Business Management Department of Szent István University for five
years, started his speech with his background in Erasmus+
programme, marketing, teaching and management. He told about his experience in building a 4 student
strong university sub-faculty into a 120 student independently accredited
institution for exchange students.
The main topics he
also covered: Establishing the niche and building towards an
audience, establishing an edge: institution and company partnerships, interaction
control - School staff alignment on common values and communication, how to
build rapport with students, integrating innovation into methodology, how all
of the above worked together: impact analysis and lessons learned.
After lunch the topic of the second segment was reaching potential students. This was based on an analysis
of current successful media campaign. He presented various examples. Here he
touched on the current challenges and talked about the importance of sensing
and interacting with the environment. He made a difference between work vs.
professions. In order to effectively reach potential students, he placed a lot
of emphasis on the type of person you are looking for, what do you offer, how
to create attention, how to keep attention, how to be memorable. He gave his
own ideas and tips on how to set up a social media campaign from scratch. The
speaker avoided the presentation style, mostly shared his own independent
experiences with the team, tried to involve the audience in the conversation,
but also tried not to tell or repeat the structure and topic of the next day's
workshop.
The final
training day began with a short overview of
the remaining tasks of the project and we discussed the next steps regarding
the project. We set the date and venue for the remaining 2 TPMs.
We continued with a
workshop, the purpose of which was to provide a place for us for common thinking,
to share our thoughts on the topic „Social media in vocational education and
training”, and to listen and learn from each other. With the help of a
lottery application, we formed 4 groups at random. Each team was given a topic
that they had to discuss and then present to the others. The 4 topics were as
follows: content, channels, generations, youth. Time for discussing and
preparation was 30 minutes and each team had 10 minutes to present each
presentation. The workshop was very well structured, there was an opportunity
to ask questions about the other group's presentation, we were able to make
comments to each other, and we were able to share our own independent opinions
on the other 3 topics as well.
In short, the
teamwork was very useful, because in addition to the fact that we learned a lot
from each other, we were able to experience the key issues related to the use
of different social media platforms from a different point of view and from a
different perspective.
