WST October Review – Think like an Entrepreneur
Each year in October, we host our annual October Work Smarter Together event. This is an opportunity for colleagues to reconnect and meet each other centred around a session with a speaker either from our own professional community or an external speaker who engages with a topic that is of interest to the WST community. It includes a networking lunch, where we invite attendees to network and chat. As always, our goal with the WST events and newsletters is to share the achievements of the community and create opportunities to come together as colleagues and celebrate them.
This year, when reviewing previous feedback and discussing themes that felt relevant, we thought about the ideas of innovative thinking, risk and failure and the skills needed to create resilience. Feedback has told us that our colleagues want to hear from engaged speakers with positive stories and lessons. Skills that we can use in both our professional and personal lives are well received and that lunch is always much appreciated.
We love to connect and consult with our colleagues and friends from across the campus and had no hesitation reaching out to connections and leads across the campus in search of a suitable suggestion. We researched and reached out to a few names but quickly settled on Erin Shrimpton. Erin is a chartered organisational psychologist and expert in workplace behaviour change. She is also an incredibly engaging upbeat person. She was easily the right fit as a speaker and we agreed that she would present a session based on her Linked In Learning module Use an Entrepreneurial Mindset to Find Success and Fulfilment at Work. This was serendipitous because UCD has provided access for all colleagues to LinkedIn Learning. We agreed that this content would be tailored for the professional UCD community and called ‘Think Like an Entrepreneur’
On October 27, we welcomed colleagues and friends to The Village auditorium. The auditorium is a fantastic space to be in, modern and light; well resourced and has a great support team. We plan to host there again soon.
Our guests arrived and we had a question for them on the screen through Mentimeter. Mentimeter is a great tool for engaging with audiences remotely and this was a great opportunity to test its potential for engaging live audiences. Audience members respond to a question by following a link and using the code to contribute to the word cloud on screen. Audiences can respond in real time to inform the discussion both remotely and in person.
Erin was introduced by Acting President Mark Rogers, sponsor of WST. We were really appreciative of his time and attention and that he stayed to join us for the networking lunch.
Erin presented a lively session filled with considered approaches to entrepreneurial thinking and the lessons that we can take from how people with this mindset approach challenges and opportunities in their lives. There was a little time for some interesting questions from our audience and then we stepped out to the balcony area of the Village for a networking lunch where the excellent selection of sandwiches were a talking point as much as Erin’s upbeat session. We were lucky to have her stay and chat during the networking lunch. It was great to be able to provide this opportunity for the WST community to come together on campus and participate in the session and catch up over sandwiches.
The session went really well and there was positive feedback. We send out surveys after sessions to be able to integrate feedback into future sessions but we’re always happy to hear from people about ideas for speakers, suggestions for topics and interest in contributing to future events or newsletter articles.
If you want to get in contact you can email agile@ucd.ie and we’ll get in touch.
