Paul Ojil (6th from left) with some FIT students

The 4th Career Fair, an event oganised by the Placement Office to facilitate students' meeting with potential employers was held on Friday, 15th February. The theme of this year's fair was  'Your future begins here!'. It was graced by presence of companies like Barclays, Citi Group, Proctor & Gamble, Bamburi, I&M Bank, PKF, KLM, Kestrel Capital, Sameer Africa, and Executive Training Consulting.

A number of speakers spoke to the students. Dr James Boyd McFie, Academic and Research Director, Faculty of Commerce gave his perspective on what it takes to succeed in a career by drawing examples from his successful students. He identified qualities like listening, initiative, time management and value addition as important to launching a successful career. He gave insights on how companies recruit and said graduates should join employment with a view of adding value to the enterprise.

Speaking on career development, Dr Caesar Mwangi, a former consultant with Deloitte and Touche and, currently a management consultant at Executive Training Consulting and a lecturer at Strathmore Business School gave a talk titled, “The buck stops here”. The talk, interweaved with humor and quotes from great people, was on career as a journey. He used a metaphor of a someone faced with the decision of choosing a matatu, choosing one, realizing it was not the best choice, changing to another matatu and moving on.

Dr Mwangi expounded the paradigm shift from reliance on natural resources to reliance on knowledge, from individual to synergy based models, and from shareholder to customer focus and sustainable profits through integrity and importance of family among others. He asked his listeners to alays have the bigger picture in mind.

The morning session ended with an inspiring entrepreneurship talk by Eric Kimani, CEO Sameer Africa. Mr Kimani is a motivational speaker, philanthropist and owner of Palm House Dairies and KCA Githunguri Campus. He gave an insightful talk on the need for a person to see himself as a CEO of a service company with one employee that needs a strategic plan, a proactive attitude and a social security plan. He emphasized the need for virtues like humility, courage, perseverance, hard and smart work and a mentality of abundance instead of scarcity.

The various departments then dived into groups. The School of Accountancy had a talk given by Dr James Boyd McFie. Ewart Salins from the Kestrel Capital gave a talk to the Faculty of Commerce while Paul Ojil from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines talked to the Faculty of Information Technology students.

The afternoon session was interactive session between students and several organizations who had pitched tents at the graduation square to sell themselves as the employers of choice.

By Timothy Kipchumba, BBIT IV

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