McCain Foods partners with company to offer career-readiness workshops for students
Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure service provider, knows how important having a professional social media presence is in today’s competitive job market.
With youth unemployment rates in Canada nearing 14 per cent, Kyndryl Canada, in partnership with McCain Foods, began offering career-readiness workshops for high school students three years ago, aiming to help students “stand out and navigate an increasingly competitive job market.”
On May 12 and 13, these workshops were held for approximately 200 students at Nackawick Senior High School and Carleton North High School, as well as Indigenous youth through the Joint Economic Development Initiative (JEDI).
Mark Matheson, Vice President of Business Development for Kyndryl Canada, said the workshops include a LinkedIn course, a professional headshot, and a workshop on building your LinkedIn profile.
Matheson said students often underestimate what they can offer employers simply because they haven’t held a job yet, but they’ve often developed many marketable skills through their extracurricular and volunteer activities.
“[During these workshops], we help students extract experience from their activities and articulate them into skills on their profiles,” said Matheson, who said that sports is a great example of an activity that helps students develop skills that employers want, such as teamwork, discipline, and time management.
Matheson said 95 per cent of employers today are using LinkedIn to find employees, and the platform currently has over one billion users. He says it’s crucial that students are taught the importance of “creating a professional online presence.”
Abby Kelly is the Vice President of the Carleton North High School (CNHS) Student Council. She was one of the students who attended the workshops.
“It’s a great program,” she said. She noted that it helps students develop the knowledge they need before entering the workplace. “A lot of kids do not have these resources, so they go into [the workforce] blind.
Drew Kinney is the Athletic Director of CNHS. He feels the workshops are a “great tool for students,” especially those who may not know what they want to do after high school.
Kinney said that through learning to navigate LinkedIn, students can “explore different connections and dig deeper into what they might want to do.”
Matheson told River Valley Sun that Kyndyl strongly believes in “doing things in the communities in which we work and live,” and that this is a way to give back and help develop the future of those communities. The workshops are offered annually at different schools.
