Everything that happened in GRADUAN in 2020

By Ahmed Wafi

Possibly our most exciting year ever!

One word to sum up 2020 for #teamGRADUAN? Awesome!

With everything that happened in 2020, we were quick to innovate and switch up our events and workshops to continue doing what we do best: Connecting the best of talent with the best of employers in Malaysia! Here’s a recap of our 2020.

GRADUAN® NEX
We kicked off 2020 with our first-ever career initiative tailored to talent with disabilities in February in collaboration with Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. GRADUAN NEX: Becoming Exceptional was supported by the Ministry of Education and officiated by UKM Chairman Tan Sri Abdul Wahid Omar. More than 100 talent from across Malaysia and 17 leading Malaysian employers including Maybank, Intel, Samsung Malaysia, KPMG, Duopharma and more joined us at the event. It was an overwhelming success with positive feedback from talent and employers, with one employer even saying she wished she could “hire all of the talent.”

Check out the highlights here.

Instagram Live!
Even with MCO in effect, GRADUAN® continued to stay busy and worked hard to provide talent with industry insights and resources to take the next step in their career. This led us to produce a series of Instagram Live sessions featuring various leaders, designed to give our talent a deeper insight into various topics such as how companies were adapting to WFH, hiring trends during these trying times, and tips from the industry experts on how to get hired during 2020.

You can catch our most popular Instagram Live series with Maybank here.

The Virtual Malaysian Career Fair
When one door closes, a window opens. We took full advantage of that window of opportunity by transforming the biggest physical Malaysian career initiative in the UK to a virtual one!

Initially scheduled to take place in March, COVID forced travel restrictions and thus for the first time in history, our UK fair had to be postponed. But that didn’t stop us from still having it. We decided to take it virtual, making it the first time we took a fair online! Companies like UMW, Maxis, Samsung, Axiata, Maybank and many more joined us for live interactive sessions with UMW hosting the very first live session in the history of GRADUAN® on 10 July and Axiata closing our virtual fair on 21 December.

Check out some of our live sessions here!

GRADUAN Aspire
Our flagship career event hit its 10th year running in 2020, and it was extra special thanks to the pandemic. The response we received for our first virtual Aspire was nothing short of overwhelming! More than 70,000 talent logged in and we received over 400,000 page views across four days from 24 to 27 October. #teamGRADUAN crafted exclusive videos and articles for over 60 participating employers, as well as digital tools such as public and private chats, unlimited job postings, on-the-spot video interviews and many more.

Virtual Australia Career Fair and Global Virtual Career Fair
Even with the year coming to an end, we were still going strong with our virtual events. In December, we ran our Virtual Australia Career Fair for Malaysian talent in Australia and the GRADUAN Global Virtual Career Fair, our first career initiative for Malaysians around the world.

The fair took place from 8 to 10 December and featured employers like Intel, Nestlé (they also held live webinars!) CIMB Bank, Teach For Malaysia, Maxis, PwC and many more. Both fairs attracted over 4,000 Malaysians across Australia, New Zealand, France, Taiwan, Korea and many more.

2020 was undoubtedly a year of firsts for GRADUAN and we will continue to provide Malaysian talent with nothing but the best career resource! Aside from being a busy year, it was also a year of reflection. “2020 pushed us to stop and be grateful for everything we have, spend more time with our families, take care of our health, and made us adapt and evolve in the way we work and conduct business,” says GRADUAN®’s Director Nabil Marie. If you thought we couldn’t get any bigger, wait till you see what we have in store for 2021!

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