Journalism Skills Prove Valuable Even in Non Media Placement

Hello my wonderful followers, I hope you all have settled in to the New Year and have found your groove.

For the first three weeks of January, I completed a work placement component at the Canadian Youth Business Foundation. CYBF assists youth between the ages of 18-34 to start a business and can receive assistance from securing financing, business plan preparation to business mentoring. You can contact the CYBF at www.cybf.ca.

As a CYBF intern, I worked directly with the Director, Joelle Foster. Working alongside Joelle was an experience to say the least. Her energy level and abilities are incredible and she is extremely versatile. She runs the whole CYBF office in Manitoba. Joelle has made this position her own and really extends a helping hand to her young entrepreneurs to ensure they succeed.

What I found interesting about my experience at CYBF was how useful my journalism training is to an organization like this. I thought I would use more public relations skills than my journalism skills but that wasn’t the case. My first task was to interview and write profiles on as many of CYBF entrepreneurs as I could in the time I had. This task took up the majority of my time. I was more than happy to practice my interviewing skills with such inspiring and ambitious people.

I also assisted Joelle with brainstorming sessions about marketing and program development. When doing this, I fell back on using my journalism skills once again. Asking open ended questions such as who, what, where, when and why helped us breakdown our thought process into specific tangible tactics. These tools can be the foundation for many situations and it is a relief for me to know I am comfortable with this thought process.

I also realized how important writing as a skill is in every aspect. I had to do a large amount of editing and tightening up of sentences and reviewing word choices in some of the information I had to review for the profiles. Knowing the difference between decent and poor writing samples was very helpful for me to produce quality work for the organization as a whole.

I also realized that writing about entrepreneurship and the impacts of entrepreneurship in Manitoba is a topic that I find very inspiring to write about., I enjoy helping entrepreneurs with their writing needs and I do think there is a market for this in Winnipeg. Being an entrepreneur requires that you wear several different hats and it is very difficult to be good at all the different things that a required of you. I would like to be a freelance writer for entrepreneurs to help them articulate their story and any other marketing materials they may require.

I hope to do my second work placement with CYBF again in April. I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to Joelle Foster for making my three week internship with CYBF a valuable learning and networking experience.