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Yule Lu

Beedie School of Business

Position Title
My Work Duties

One of the tasks I had to fulfill was coordinate group tours for SFU prospective students and SFU Alumnus. It is a very rewarding task as many of the guests enjoyed seeing the Burnaby campus during summertime. Meanwhile, I also conducted month to month campus tours and front counter schedules for both Burnaby and Surrey campus schedules. During the summer terms, many student staff were away for vacation; which made making the schedules more difficult. I still managed to collect student staff’s availabilities using MS Teams where all the 30 students can edit and update their availabilities at the same time.

Another task I have is to supervise student staff to make sure expectations are met. When there were issues they would report to me and I would help problem solve with them. For example, I provided them with solutions and guidance to operate our CRM system whenever technical problems came up. In addition to this, since we changing the student staff’s job description, more training is required for student staff. I coordinated individual training sessions for them, so all the student staff could work efficiently to conduct tour guides in both the Burnaby and Surrey campuses.

Lastly, I was also apart of the recruitment team, and helped with the hiring and onboarding process for the next potential co-op student. The first step was to review all the resumes and cover letters individually before short listing our top 5 who we each think were the best candidates. After that, we had a meeting and decided the candidates that we wanted to interview. I drafted the interview questions, in-basket assignment questions, and reference check questions before my manager finalized those questions. After we hired the new co-op student, I also helped to develop the onboarding and training plan. My last three weeks of my co-op work term were to train the next co-op student and to make sure the transition was smooth.

Skills Learned

On the job, my manager helped me to improve my email writing skills. She found some good resources for me to learn and asked me to rewrite some email replies and provided me informative feedbacks. From this, I understood that I need to be aware of who I sent the email to and provide them with detailed and clear information to reduce confusion and increase efficiency. I also learned how to use our CRM system (Salesforce) to create reports and dashboards which are used for future campus tour decisions for the manager. This information is collected from tour guests who are prospective students and their parents and is valuable for when we look for areas of improvement.

Through the hiring and training process of the next co-op student, I also learned how to draft a good resume and cover letter as I was in HR during the process. This position also taught me how to prepare and present in an interview. Being on the other side of the hiring process and watching others answer interview questions was very helpful because I can saw what I should or should not do if I was interviewed as a candidate.

How to Apply Skills Learned

The technical and transferable skills I gained from this position are useful for my future career. First, in many workplaces, email communication is very commonly used, and being able to write professional and concise emails can show that I am detail oriented and could represent a good personal and company image to all the external and internal stakeholders. Salesforce is a system that is also used by many companies to run their daily business operations; therefore, my experience in using the system could help me to learn even faster in the future for other job opportunities if they have the same or similar system.

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Author

Yule Lu

Beedie School of Business
visibility  163
Nov 28, 2022