Dear Careers Division colleagues and friends,
It is a true honor to serve as this year’s Careers Division Chair. This division has been my AOM home for many years and has offered me many learning opportunities and new friends. I’m excited to have the chance to give back to the division and, hopefully, contribute to making us an even greater community of careers scholars.
Our previous division chairs Scott Seibert, Jamie Ladge, and Gina Dokko have made tremendous progress on the goals we defined in our previous 5-year review during the past few years. These goals were:
Goal 1: Improve Productive Interaction among junior and senior scholars
Goal 2: Improve Opportunities for Research Collaboration among Members
Goal 3: Provide Value to the Membership beyond the AOM Conference
Goal 4: Raise the Scholarly Prestige of the Division
Goal 5: Continued Efforts to Recruit, Engage and Sustain Membership & Sponsorship
Even though the COVID pandemic challenged (and still challenges!) us in many ways, it’s been a pleasure to see how hard our volunteers and officers have worked to come up with new and exciting ideas. For example, our Careers division community conference in Vienna 2020 was a true highlight. Moreover, we have made new connections with junior scholars from all over the world who joined the online conference as their first AOM experience. Other examples of recent initiatives include mentoring activities, online careers in the rough sessions, coffee hours about careers and diversity, a regional ambassador program, and YouTube videos of award winners and prominent careers scholars. As a result, I believe our division has become an active and vibrant community of scholars who connect throughout the year.
This year, I would like to prioritize three main goals. The first one is easy: continue with all the progress we have already made on reaching our goals. After all, if something is already in great shape, there’s no need to make any changes! My second goal will be to enhance our online presence, for example, through social media activities. We are doing so many great things, and I feel we can become even better at showing it to our members and anyone outside of the Careers division. We will develop plans to, for example, feature more videos on our YouTube channel and share career-related content via LinkedIn and Twitter. Please follow us if you haven’t done so already! The third goal is to start preparing for our second Careers Division community conference, which we plan to organize in early 2023.
It’s both daunting and challenging to follow in the footsteps of all the great division chairs that preceded me. Above all, though, I am looking forward to working with all of you to make this a great year. If you have any ideas for this or would like to volunteer for the division, you can always reach out to me or any division officers (who are all listed on our website).
Thank you for your continued engagement with and commitment to our division!
Jos Akkermans
Division Chair, Careers Division, 2021-2022