I was there with Sue Heilbronner, CEO of TravelShark, who I had roped in at the last minute to help me judge the pitches for our WITNext Summercamp event on June 21-22 at Artspace@Helutrans. Also with us was Syazanah Haniff, who is running WITNext.

Prof Aaron Hung had asked if we would submit our event for this term’s competition – the scores go towards their overall grades – so it’s a pretty serious undertaking.

Our brief to the students was: Come up with a marketing plan to drive participants to our Summercamp, an activity programme for the live event that would be fun, enriching and engaging and a list of exhibitors/sponsors they’d like to see at the event.

We also asked each team to produce a video on “My Dream Job” as part of the competition we will be launching for the Summercamp. (We will share these  videos at a later stage, one of them brought tears to Sue’s eyes.)

There were two other projects – one involving a marketing campaign for a destination and another for a retail travel agency. I won’t share those because that’s not my place to do so but have to say, the three teams that took on our Summercamp delivered impressive presentations.

I suppose it’s because the “WITNext Summercamp: Travel. Not Just A Job” is a project that speaks to their hearts and plight. Most of them are about to leave school to face that moment of truth when they have to step into that big world out there and get a job and, as we know, the best ideas are personal, when they matter to you yourself.

One team (Destination) shared a survey they did, showing that among the most aspired industries, banking/finance (43%) and marketing/advertising (35%) still led travel and tourism (33%).

What I liked about this was that the students saw this as an opportunity, not a problem.

Especially since there was “high intention” expressed by the respondents to join travel and tourism. Positive perceptions include fun, hospitality, exciting while negative perceptions were, exhausting, unprofitable, boring, low pay.

Among sources of information, job portals were the highest, at 84%, followed by recommendation from friends (65%) – showing the power of social yet again. Employment agencies came next at 40%.

Another team (Airplane) shared research that showed that while tourism was rather high in the “interest in joining” quadrant, the reality was tourism had the lowest employment among youths (20-29), according to Singapore employment figures. The top sector was public service/education, followed by financial & insurance and manufacturing.

When asked why they wanted to join travel and tourism, the responses were “fun, travel, people interaction”.

All the teams (the third team being Compass) showed creativity with marketing ideas. Some were probably harder to execute than others but simple ideas such as “Guess The Job”, Facebook competitions and games and Twitter campaigns were definitely do-able. It shows the high social engagement desired by youths in Singapore.

Research done by the teams showed that we should use Facebook as our primary communication vehicle, followed by our own website and the web in general.

In terms of activities, they wanted, in this order, informational talks, sharing of experiences, and practical activities. Also desired were soft skills training and knowledge/quizzes. The Compass team came up with the “Last Board Standing” game which looked quite fun – we might try it.

One cool idea was for us to structure the programme into three stages – Know Yourself, Know The Industry, and Finding A Match. Thanks, Team Compass.

As for the exhibitors they wanted to see at the Summercamp, they wanted diversity – from cruises to resorts to online travel agencies to adventure companies to hotels and airlines.

“We know there are great jobs out there, just that we don’t know about them,” said one of the team members.

This is the pain we hope to address with the WITNext Summercamp with the collaboration of the very same people we want to address. Thanks, Prof Aaron and his students.

Check out our programme here. It is free to students and job seekers. Space is limited so sign up first with [email protected]

Travel companies interested in joining us on this journey as sponsors, contact [email protected] as well.

Companies and organisations that have committed to taking part as sponsors include: Abacus, Accor, Brand Karma, e27, AirAsia Expedia, Girls In Tech, Kosmopolito Hotels & Resorts, MakeMyTrip, TMS Asia Pacific, TravelStart and Worldhotels. Our industry partners include HSMAI and Singapore Hotels Association.