Richard is the Founder and CEO of CareerPath Mobile, a mobile technology suite “focused on improving student engagement and communications in order to help them find their pathway to success.” Richard walks us through his many roles within the company, from user interface design to trade shows and sales calls. Richard tells all students to try to find a mentor in a role you aspire to and to experience as many careers as possible through internships and informational interviews before settling into a career path for yourself.
Transcript
My name is Richard Portelance. I'm from CareerPath Mobile, I'm the CEO and founder. Career path is a mobile learning platform for students to engage in the career planning process and other co-carriculars on their time and in their space, which is mobilly based. So it can allow you to do things such as discovering how to use designed thinking in your career planning process. Health and wellness can use it to track different initiatives that they need to do for you, so it could be: you go in and you do an activity or a milestone and watch a video or perform a task that helps you become more aware of who you are and what you want to do and also ready for that next step into a career. My day is pretty varied because we're still considered a start up so it consists of U.X. design work. It consists of customer interactions, we're talking to a lot of schools, interviewing, and seeing what the product fit is, we do customized solutions so, often times it's looking at and interpolating what's happening at a school or within a program and figuring out what the fit is so the software can do what it's meant to do, it's writing curriculum for the software, so it's a platform that can have a lot of inputs and it's also working on fundraising and talking to people, investors and other people that want to get involved in what we're doing. It's multi pronged, certainly the conferences are great because they give you exposure to a wide array of people whether they're in the career service office or they're in student services or some place in the university. It's also a lot of one on one conversations so, calling upon and trying to reach and contact certain schools and individuals at those schools who have influence and power to make decisions, so finding that right person. We do kind of traditional marketing which includes some print advertising. We also do e-mail blasts, we do letters, and then we get into the social media world, but a lot of it in this world, it's about making sure that you have referrals. It's doing a good job for one customer and they refer you to the next customer and that's how you build a lot of momentum.
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