Jobs Day 2019

Seventeen professionals gather at TBS to explain their roles to the students

What does a Product Manager do? Are marketing positions always creative? Is the job of a Finance Drector exciting? Management studies can lead to a great number of divergent career paths but students may not know exactly who does what in the business sector and they may also be misled by prejudices about certain functional areas.

For this reason, the TBS Career Starter department organises the Jobs Day each year, an event where professionals visit TBS to explain what their job entails. “The main purpose of the Jobs Day is to let our students know about the nuances of certain positions within the greater functional areas of a company,” explains Delphine Arnau, Corporate Relations and Career Starter Manager at TBS Barcelona.

TBS welcomed seventeen professionals to this year’s Jobs Day, who covered the areas of Marketing, Business Development, Finance, and Business Operations. The students were able to benefit from the experience of professionals from a wide range of companies, from startups and SMEs to multinationals such as Axa, Mango, Deloitte, Yves Saint Laurent, and Almirall, among others.

“All the professionals spoke to our students about their career paths, their daily tasks, and they also gave advice about the skills that are required for each of their roles and what to do to secure a similar position,” says Delphine Arnau. “This year, most of them were TBS alumni, and quite young, which was highly appreciated by the students because they were able to identify with them better.”

Indeed, according to the satisfaction survey conducted among the more than 100 Bachelor and Master Programme students in attendance at the event, “The fact that the professionals giving testimonials are so young but have achieved so much already,” was one of the highlights of Jobs Day. “They seemed passionate about their jobs and gave very honest testimonials,” mentions one of the students in the survey.

Every year, the Career Starter department tries to deliver testimonials on positions that are less common for our students, typically those related to Business Operations and Logistics, such as a Store Manager, a Supply Chain Manager, or a Traffic Agent. Nevertheless, even the most familiar positions have their nuances.

TBS Alumnus Clémentine Yunta, who is a Key Account Manager at IQV, an agro-industry company, told us about the specifics of her job: “I think the students were unaware that the position of a key account manager is almost entirely about relationships; you are responsible for communicating the needs of your customers to your company, for translating those needs for them, and you must know who you have to answer to; you depend 100% on your colleagues.”