Hi all! Last week I started my internship at the Retirement Village Association of Australia (RVA). Obviously, by name the job doesn't sound too fantastic, but luckily enough for me I have the most amazing mentor who I am working with and she has already made me so excited about the job and what I am going to get to do with her over the semester.
The office consists of my mentor Katheryn who has the job title of National Membership and WA Regional Manager. She is an ex Curtin graduate with a background in PR and Marketing so really her main role is to build the membership and exposure of the organisation, a large portion of her job is liaising with different publics such as local government, RVA members, WA Retirement Village Representatives and Consumers.
As an 'introduction' in to what I will be doing I spent the day doing some 'admin' work, basically photo copying and filing media articles, as well as assisting with any potential ideas for the articles. Being a new year, they are currently organising the events for 2011 (predominantly events and professional development days for the RVA members and associates) which hopefully I should get to help out with quite a lot. So my afternoon was spent in a meeting to discuss with representatives from the larger retirement villages Katheryn's ideas for events to run.
I am loving learning about how everything works in the 'real world', it's great to see to positives and the negatives of the industry which we are soon going to be entering in to!
Until my next post, I hope everyone is enjoying themselves at their organisation!
Jade- Bentley Campus
2 comments:
Wow Jade,
very different placement, what made you get involved there?
Ive had to contact some retirement groups as part of my work at this organisation and I found the technological barrier a hard one to over come as many groups weren't email/ tech savvy. Is this a problem at your organisation?
Hey, I actually applied for a job there which Nigel DeBussy posted on Blackboard. I got right through to the end but then the CEO of the organisation decided to 'restructure' and got rid of the position I was applying for. My mentor Kat (being an ex-student) knew the difficulties in finding placements so she offered for me to come do mine with her, which I happily accepted.
Speaking with the directors and leaders of the villages is really easy because they are all so approachable and relatively up to date with technology. But my 2nd day I spent a lot of my time organising a seminar they are doing, so I called like 30 interested seniors. Personally, I don't struggle communicating with older generations because I have worked in a call center where the demographic was older people.
I will admit, it would be a lot easier if the consumers used internet. I had to do a few interviews over the phone with people who live in retirement villages, and I struggled keeping up writing their answers to my questions. If they had internet I could have emailed the questions!
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