Today I went to a presentation by Prospects, demonstrating their virtual careers fair. I went with alot of expectation and was very sadly disapointed. I expected to see innovative use of technology from one of the countries largest careers advisers. What I was shown was endless list of Employer profiles and a clumsy chat facility.

I could see the advantage of this if it was a centrally hosted solution, with one large repository of employer profiles, however this was not the case, employers are required to supply information to individual institutions virtual fairs.

Nevertheless this got me thinking, how can we achieve this here at the UoL.

The features of the virtual careers fair could be easily constructed within Plone:

• employer profiles: presented, with logos, themed by sector. The employer could easily supply this information via a Plone form. The man from Prospects said they didn't link to the company website, but why not? These are kept up-to-date by the companies and avoid data replication and redundancy. The issue of navigating students away from our website can be easily avoided by opening the company website in a new window.
• employment opportunities: links to Jobs Online, Job Shop or company websites
  
• discussion: this can be done on the discussion forum in plone, with an RSS feed. This can happen in real time, over an extended period or revisited.
• The Prospects virtual fair was only run over a limited period of time. Does this need to be the case. Does a virtual fair have to happen in real time?

Seeing some of the chat facilities and the man from Prospects highlighting the fact that our Employer on campus events were only accessible by campus based students had me thinking, could we offer Virtual Employers on Campus.

At the University of Leicester we have an under utilised tool called Adobe Connect (http://connect.le.ac.uk) , a video conferencing tool. I have considered many ways this could be used in SSDS and the idea of Virtual Employers on Campus, could be a great start. We could ask Employers to present in the online session and student attendees could be involved.

Here is what it may look like:

The key features are:

• Voice and video capabilities for presenter and/or attendees
• Text chat
• Presentation area: this can be PowerPoint, Flash or even an active desktop.

Another key feature is the session can be recorded for attendees/non-attendees to view at date.