Kickstart Just Jump Started

Warwick Kickstart, a brand-new society, hosted a panel which explored the world of unusual careers during their first ever event on Thursday. This kind of conversation is hard to find for Warwick students who often lack exposure to career options beyond the Financial or Engineering sector – making a successful career in anything else appear almost mythical.
Kickstart hosted a panel comprising of two technology entrepreneurs; Savannah De Savary (CEO & founder of Industryhub, a proptech) and Stefan Van Der Fluit (entrepreneur currently working at Workplace by Facebook), an NGO consultant Eric Findlay, and Hamisha Sethi, a freelance broadcast journalist, to discover how these industries are changing.

What’s Special about work-culture in Startups & Tech?
Der Fluit and De Savary agreed the sense of purpose and feeling of appreciation they experienced in creating and fulfilling their own vision was unique. All members of the panel stressed how vital these aspects are to a career. In light of this, companies are beginning to engage with these needs by restructuring incentives beyond financial compensation, thinking about how their field represents meaning and how to value their employees’ contributions.
Stefan Van Der Fluit stressed the importance of appreciating employees in a changing industry landscape. He spoke highly of how the Facebook work culture is indicative of how recognizing people’s work produces soaring outcomes. He made the example of how engineers are free to choose which projects to work on. As such, project leaders need to sell their idea and convince engineers of its worth in order to realise their concept.

The Character of a Company
Eric Findlay, working for NGO Wateraid, carried out his analysis and prediction for the changing work environment in NGOs along the same lines, underlining how a company’s health reflects the health of its leadership.
Whilst De Savary was keen on soft skill and personality beyond qualifications and skills determining what she looks for in potential employees, Hamisha Sethi, freelance journalist, detailed how broadcasters and news firms are looking for increased degrees of versatility. From her experience, journalists are now expected to produce a finished package and finding teams with specialized individuals who create a single product together is becoming harder to find.
The most memorable advice the panel gave was not to be afraid to take risks. Granted, they can afford such an outlook having turned out so successfully.