​What started as a five week campaign has resulted in 3.6million video views and 18,700 new followers and counting.

Over the past five weeks I’ve conducted thirty interviews with Sydney-siders to find out what they do for work and what career advice they have.

Whilst vox pops aren’t an original idea, there was definitely a gap in the Australian TikTok environment for street interviews catered toward learning and education.

The popularity of edu-tainment style content isn’t new either. There are countless popular culture style vox-pop TikTok accounts based in the United States and a few in Sydney. Taking inspiration from their popularity, virality and discoverability, Stopgap has been brought into the world of Gen Z. However, our demographic extends well beyond that age group.

The power of social media for small businesses is infinite even with limited resources. With the right strategy, TikTok can become an essential part of marketing strategies. The recruitment industry in particular has a huge opportunity to provide education to their online communities.

TikTok continually challenges streaming and television watch time. The SmartCompany shows Aussies watch 42million hours of TIkTok content a month. And we’re proud to be a small portion of that.

STARTING AGAIN

With the autonomy of my role, I’ve been able to run with many ideas and projects over the past 11 months. This includes completely transforming our TikTok strategy and reach over the course of 5 weeks. 

The goal of #SGTalkstoSydney is to bring words of wisdom from people in the workforce and emphasise the career coaching and mentorship that is integral to Stopgap. This has been integral to Stopgap’s mission since 1993, to disrupt the recruitment industry’s reputation for bad practice and lead with a people first mission.

It was interesting to hear the responses from Sydney-siders who advise you to follow your passion and dreams. Unsurprisingly, flexibility, salary and company culture were also high on employees' job search criteria. 

As for higher education, the response was mixed. Many emphasised that degrees are not essential to get into industries like cybersecurity, project management and technology. Or that degrees are not necessary to reach middle or upper management but rather for more technical jobs. Our most viral video ‘To Study or Not to Study’ proves that working straight out of high school or even deferring university is possible to become a Java Engineer or UX Designer. 

Does the best learning happen outside formal education?

I’m a big advocate of work integrated learning. What I’ve learnt from working at Stopgap over the past year has been invaluable to my development alongside my design and media degree. Whilst this is not possible for everyone, I recommend undertaking an internship to transition to part time work in their field of study.

In an ideal world, higher education would make work-integrated learning through short-term or longer term places compulsory for marketing, advertising and digital related degrees.

Either way, the response both online and offline to #SGTalkstoSydney has been incredible. Thanks to our videographer and the support of Team Stopgap in helping me make it possible.

We’ll be back on your For You Page soon for phase two. So stay in touch.