As Lucija Spiljak/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 14th of January, 2019, despite the continuing problems on Croatia’s labour market and the mass exodus of the country’s talented youth, Croatian students and student associations have some truly valuable projects which showcase real effort, work, and common proactivity with the hope for prosperity, survival and finding employment. Among them is eSTUDENT, the most active Croatian student association founded back in 2004 under the initiative of proactive students and assistants, with the wish that the association and its members become initiators of change, gain practical experience and develop a network of knowledge.
Students lead the association, its projects and its various initiatives, and their goal is, among other things, to provide additional education to other students with a variety of grants, projects, and study quality enhancement. Today, the association is made up of students from the University of Zagreb and other institutions of higher education, with more than 300 members, and each year the association organises more than twenty projects involving thousands of students from across the Republic of Croatia and the wider region. They also launched the Starter project with which, unlike classical student services, work finds the students.
“This involves state-of-the-art technology and programming solutions which have enabled us to send a job offer directly to via email to every student looking for an internship or for employment. Starter’s application is free, fast and simple, it provides direct access to excellent jobs, practices and scholarships,” explained Julija Puškar, the coordinator of Starter at eSTUDENT. They began with the Starter project to link proactive Croatian students to employment programs for the best companies operating across the Republic of Croatia.
“The Starter system is a platform which delivers ads to students, depending on their personal preferences, more specifically to a specific target group of students, many companies send their ads to our system, and members of eSTUDENT who are actively working on the system will forward ads to a particular student group on a daily basis. You just choose the type of ad you want to receive – practice, internship, part time jobs, full time jobs, and the so on.
So, Starter helps students out and makes it easier for them to look for internships or jobs, while allowing companies to search for the best candidates for certain jobs,” explains Puškar. The first step sees the company send an advertisement to Starter, this ad is then passed on to students with specific interests, and then applications go directly to the employer.
Active members of the Starter team then review the application for the particular ad before submitting the application. There is also the possibility to receive advice on how to improve an application before submitting it to a business or company. In the academic year 2017/2018, the Starter system received more than 350,000 emails and has more than 3,500 active members. The eSTUDENT Student Association is also conducting several projects including Moot Court Croatia, App Start Contest, Case Study Competition, Elektroboj, Mozgalo, Smartup, and Vizionar.
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Click here for the original article by Lucija Spiljak for Poslovni Dnevnik
