Association News

2021 Virtual APCDA Conference

Are you feeling Webinar Fatigue?  Do you spend far too much time in front of a computer screen?  Does a 3-day, 3-hours a day event sound like a pain?  Our conference will include a wide variety of presentations with 6 simultaneous choices for most of the time slots.  But our conference will be much more.  One thing that makes a real conference so valuable is the opportunity to meet many professionals in the field.  Both as a networking opportunity and as a chance to gain valuable tips, this makes an in-person conference really valuable.  We have found software that will help us to provide those benefits to you during the APCDA Conference.  The software, called Hubilo, offers 3 ways to network:

Post on the Event Feed.  Like Facebook, WeChat, or WhatsApp, the Event Feed allows you to post photos or comments before or during the event.  Do you want to find other attendees who have experience with a project you are facing, such as planning a Career Fair, Job Shadowing Day, or other career activity? On the Event Feed, post a question asking who else has done or wants to learn about doing this type of activity.  The event feed offers a button for others to respond – indicating they want to discuss this topic.  Of course, photos also encourage interaction by showing a bit about you and inviting others to interact.

Use the Speakers List or Attendees List to text or chat with anyone else at the conference.  Both the text and visual chat are built into the software.

During the breaks, visit the Lounge.  Sorry – we can’t bring the tea cart to you – you will have to provide your own beverage and snacks.  But you can select a “chair” at a “table” with others who want to talk about a topic that interests you.  When you pick a “chair,” others can see you “sitting” there and can join you – as long as there is a free chair.  The software opens a window where you can talk, just like Gallery View in Zoom.  Visit with Poster presenters, Sponsors, or other attendees who are sitting at a table with an interesting topic.  Of course, you can also text people you want to talk to and tell them where you are sitting.

In order to give you time to learn how to use these features, Virtual Registration will open May 19.  You will have 5 days before the conference to look around the website and try these features.  Use the Event Feed to post questions.  Use the Speaker and Delegate lists to find people you want to meet with and ask for a meeting time.  Explore the lounge and visit the Exhibitors, who will be happy to meet with you.  When the Conference is in session, May 19-29, the Sessions list will provide links to the presentations, so you can quickly join the right presentation.  While browsing the presentation options, why not “favorite” the presentations that sound most interesting?  Then, you can quickly join when the presentation is about to start.

In addition, we will have several kinds of contests.  Missing the intercultural exploration that normally accompanies an APCDA Conference?  The first contest asks attendees to create a virtual tour.  These virtual tours must be submitted it at least one month before the conference.  The winning team for this contest will receive up to 3 free registrations.  All tours will be posted for conference attendees.  Attendees are encouraged to enjoy as many tours as you can before and during the conference!

The second type of contest happen between May 19 and May 29.  Take a quiz about the topics offered in the breakout sessions.  Post a photo of the costume you plan to wear while attending the conference (come with all the people in your family, professional clothes, or party/formal clothes, national costume – whatever you prefer).  The other attendees can imagine sitting beside you in the pictured costume.  Share you favorite music with us and we will play it during the "Lunch" breaks.  Love to network?  The Leader Board shows who is winning by using the software well.  We will award prizes for those who make the best use of the networking features offered.  Prizes for winning any of the contests between May 19 and May 29 will be certificates to attend a webinar of your choice for free.

Does all of this work in China?  We looked really hard for software that was built to work in China.  The firewalls between China and the rest of the world make it hard to find software that works for everyone.  We have found ways to get around these limitations for all of the conference features except the lounge.  Rather than use the online presentation software offered by our Virtual Conference software, we have arranged to use Zoom for all of the conference presentations. Our friends in China assure us that Zoom does work in China.  The Lounge feature does not work in China, but the other two options for networking do work.  Using the Speaker list and the Attendee list, you can text or hold a face-to-face meeting with anyone at the conference.  Of course, you are welcome to arrange a group chat on WeChat.  We believe those in China will be able to take advantage of the full conference experience.

We are also grateful to the Hubilo software for providing time zone support.  For Webinars, we list the meeting times in 16 different time zones.  Luckily, after you log into the conference website on May 19 and tell the software which time zone you live in, the Sessions list will present all of the dates and times to you in your own time zone (all 24 global time zones are included).  In the meantime, check out our Schedules page under the Conference on our website where we have 16 different conference schedules so that you can see when events will happen in your own time zone.

Preliminary Conference Program

Conference Registration

More information

Discovering What People Value about APCDA

By Dr. Marilyn Maze

At the beginning of November 2020, we added Google Analytics to our website at the request of the Qatar Foundation, because they wanted to know how many people download the Arabic version of the Glossary, which they translated for us.  Google Analytics is a free service that counts the number of visits to webpages.  It reports on:

• Views: The number of times anyone looked at a page
• Users:  The number of people who looked at the page
• New Users: The number of unique people who looked at a page (people like staff are only counted once)
• Views per User: the average number of times each person looked at a page
• Average Engagement Time:  The average number of seconds each person spent on a page.

Of course, these data can be misleading.  Staff visit many pages to check/update them, and those views get counted.  When the phone rings or a person gets coffee, the software may indicate that a user “viewed” a page for a long time, when no one was actually looking at the screen.  Everyone lands on the welcome page when they first come to our website (unless they are coming from a link in an email or news blog), so that page is, of course, our most visited.  But this data does give us a way to measure what people care about and how often they visit our website.  The data below reflect 2 months (November and December 2020).

In the table below you see totals by Main Menu topic for each of the statistics provided.  Looking at the “Views” column to see which part of our website had the most use, we see the most views in Webinars (which is called Events to include the New Member and Non-Member Meetings). People looked at large numbers of recorded webinars, as well as registered for six live events during that period.  For the second and third columns, totaling these data is not really correct statistically, because the total counts the same person every time they visit another page. But the New User numbers do give us some idea about the volume of people visiting each part of our website.  The Welcome area attracted the largest number of new users.  During November, a lot of people were looking at our Call for Proposals, so that part was visited by the next largest number of new users, then Country/Area Information and News are tied for 3rd place. 

	Views	Users	New Users	Views per user	Engagement time
Welcome	1558	951	586	1.5	44.3
Conference	1560	1062	576	1.2	35.6
Membership	930	514	98	1.6	37.2
Webinars/Events	1853	860	385	2.3	38.9
News	1066	726	476	1.5	28.7
Resources	349	233	94	1.8	16.6
Country Information	1025	747	477	1.4	40.1
Profile Management	508	195	58	2.2	44.6

What, specifically, were people doing in these sections of the website?  For each of these menu topics, we have selected the most popular pages under that topic.

Under the Welcome topics, we have a lot of information about APCDA as an association.  This table shows which pages in that area were visited by the most people.  We can see that a lot of people visited the “About” page which contains our Vision and Mission, and they visited our Leadership page which contains bios for each of our leaders.  A noticeable number also considered donating to APCDA, although only a couple did so.

Page	Users
Welcome	669
About APCDA	87
Leadership	55
History of APCDA	43
Committees	27
Contact Us	24
Donate	18

Under the Conferences topic, of course the Call for Proposals and the 2021 Conference received the most attention.

Page	Users
Call for Proposals	285
2021 Conference	237
Scholarships	197
2020 Conference	79
2019 Conference Presentations	53

People also looked at past conferences and at other information about the conference such as Scholarships, Awards, Proposal Tips, and Presentations Tips.  They also looked at Past Award Recipients.

In the Membership area, the largest number of people looked at the Join-Renew pages.  But they also looked at the Benefits page, each of our Member Organizations, and our Legacy Partners.  Members who log in see the Member Directory, so that page was well used.

Page	Users
Join-Renew	81
Member Benefits	79
Member Directory	50
Member Organizations	32
Legacy Partners	25

Under Webinars, our November and December live events offerings were, naturally, very popular.  But many people also looked at our libraries of past webinars and watched many recorded webinars.

Page	Users
ReimagineU (event registration and recorded webinar)	138
December APCDA Meetup	132
The Past, Present, and Future of Career Counseling	101
Recorded Webinars	62
Free Webinars	50
Live Webinars	44
Recent Webinars	40
November New Member Orientation	21

Each of our News pages was visited by large numbers of people, including the Through COVID series which, by this time, was old news. And 25 people decided to add their names to our mailing list.

Page	Users
Announcements	232
Career Trends	175
Association News	151
Member Recognition	51
Through COVID	50
Subscribe	25

Our Resources were not visited as often as other topics, but the Journal and each of the past issues of the Journal had many visits.  The Arabic version of the Glossary, which was announced on November 15, drew a substantial number of people. Our other glossaries, ethics, and competencies also were used.

Page	Users
Journal	52
Arabic Glossary	35
APCDJ Sept 2020	23
Glossary	18
Ethical Guidelines	16
Competencies	15
APCDJ Subscription	10

Many people visited our Country/Area Information pages and every country had several visits with people clearly reading several articles on the pages that interested them.

Page	Users
Philippines	149
Singapore	73
Vietnam	52
Australia	48
North India	42

The last section of the webinar is not part of the menu, but rather a service that is offered by the website.  Each person in our database can see their own profile, and while looking at the Member Directory, they can view the profiles of others.  Some people also asked for help with passwords, told our system not to send them any more emails, or looked at invoices (probably in the process of paying). 

Page	Users
Member profile (someone else's profile)	57
My profile (self-profile)	51
Reset password request	20
Unsubscribe from emails	16
Invoice (for payment)	10

In addition, 150 people used the website Search function.

These data provide important information about how our website is used and which parts of our website are valued most.  We plan to continue to study these data over time and see what more we can learn.  Given the amount of work we put into maintaining and updating the pages on the website, we are happy to know people are reading our webiste.

Career Support for Arabic Youth Boosted by QCDC’s Arabic Edition of Career Development Terms Glossary

Initiative part of QCDC’s ongoing efforts to promote Arabic language resources

Doha, Qatar, 15 November 2020: A successful collaboration between Qatar Career Development Center (QCDC) and the Asia Pacific Career Development Association (APCDA) has culminated in the Arabization of the Glossary of Career Development Terms, which will benefit Arabic speakers and professionals around the world. View the announcement here.

Primarily intended to serve as a resource for professionals in the career development and vocational assessment field, the Arabic guide will assist career counselors, academic advisors, career practitioners, human resource professionals, trainers and teachers working with Qatari and Arab youth, across the region and globally, in planning their career paths.

Given the diversity of the field, the glossary is an important step toward establishing a shared understanding of commonly used terms and phrases. The Arabic edition will be dynamic and continue to develop and grow as experts suggest improvements or additions to its contents.

QCDC, a Qatar Foundation (QF) member, has long endeavored to address the gap in Arabic resources in the field of career guidance and professional development, which continues to pose an obstacle to QCDC’s mission to provide support services for Arab youth.

Mr. Abdulla Al-Mansoori, Director, QCDC, said: “Through this latest initiative, QCDC has made an important contribution to the promotion of the Arabic language, offering a resource to Arabic speakers and professionals around the world for creating impactful content and training programs. The achievement will empower career development experts to better guide our youth, not only in Qatar but all across the Arab World, on their ambitious career journeys.”

APCDA is a non-profit association incorporated for educational purposes in the state of Maryland, USA, providing training for specialists engaged in facilitating career development in the Asia Pacific region. Conferences, workshops and networking events enable the exchange of knowledge and collaboration on professional projects.

The initial development of the Glossary in English stemmed from APCDA’s objective for the Asia Pacific region to speak the same language related to career planning and development. The English language glossary was completed in 2017, with the aim of eventually offering versions in all languages spoken by its members.

Gulnur Ismayil-Isparova, Executive Director, APCDA, said: We embrace more than 300 members from over 20 countries around the world under the APCDA umbrella. Association is a wide multicultural and multilingual platform. It is important for us to ensure the exchange of ideas and best practices is communicated smoothly. The Glossary gives us chance to understand each other and effectively serve our clients in various corners of our regional coverage. We are thankful to Qatar Career Development Center for this valuable contribution and opening access to the APCDA glossary for Arabic speaking nationalities.”

As a member of APCDA, QCDC has traditionally participated in their annual conference and the publication of an Arabic edition of the glossary was therefore the next logical step, which enables APCDA to now offer this important resource to all its members.

In recent years, QF has increased its efforts to promote Arabic, the world’s sixth most spoken language. QF has launched several initiatives to address the challenges of modernizing academic programs and incentivizing linguistic institutions to keep abreast of technological advances in a bid to promote classical Arabic, which faces intense competition from colloquial dialects.

In keeping up with that mission and as part of its own efforts to promote career guidance resources in Arabic, QCDC was the first institution to offer the Career Advisor Training Course in both Arabic and English, in Qatar and the GCC region. The program aims to equip professionals with the basic skills and knowledge to offer career planning and counseling services to guide Qatari youth to embark on career paths. More than 150 participants have successfully graduated from the program to date.

Announcing the New

APCDA Ethical Guidelines

Adopted October 2020 by the APCDA Board

The APCDA Board wishes to express its sincere gratitude to the Ethics Taskforce which has just completed its work of reviewing the original APCDA Ethical Guidelines, questioning every word, comparing our statements to those our other career practitioner associations, and including wording appropriate to the many countries that are represented by APCDA.  This taskforce consisted of Dr. Joseph Chan (Hong Kong), Dr. Vandana Gambhir-Chopra (India), Leonila Urrea (Philippines), Gulnur Ismayil-Isparova (Azerbaijan), and Dr. Marilyn Maze (USA). 

According to Dr. Brian Hutchison, “Upon reflection, this is what makes us a professional body in that we are a band of similar and dissimilar professionals in so many intricate ways that only an agreed upon set of principles, grounded in common values makes us one body.  It does not feel like hyperbole to me to say that today I think APCDA became a professional organization in the truest sense of the word.”

We recommend that each member read these ethical guidelines and think about their implications for practice.  In order to make them come to life for our members, Dr. Chopra has planned a series of Member Webinars in 2021 to review case studies related to ethics and discus our real life examples of time when ethics may get trampled by expediency or financial constraints.  We hope you will join these webinars/

You can find the APCDA Ethical Guidelines here, which is under Resources on our website.

2021 Virtual Conference Theme:
Walking on Uncharted Career Paths

The theme for the 2021 Virtual Conference is Walking on Uncharted Career Paths.  We have endured many disruptions and stress in our lives in the past year and we adjust daily to a different “new normal.”  These changes have placed a premium on resilience and adaptability. The role of the career practitioner has expanded to helping clients deal with these changes, fear, and uncertainty.  Looking toward the future, we expect to continue focusing on innovation and sustainability.  Hope should be part of the “new normal” by May of 2021, but we are all walking on uncharted territory.  We invite you to propose presentations that help to guide us as we face the future.

Just at the time APCDA is planning a virtual conference, the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) offered a virtual event about the economy and its impact on conference planning globally.  ICCA polled the attendees to identify overall economic trends (macro trends) and trends related to the conference planning industry (micro trends).

On a macro level, the global economy is experiencing increasing impact from the pandemic.  The ability of the world’s governments to support their populations by increased government spending is declining, resulting in an expected increase in unemployment in the 4th quarter of 2020 and decrease in GDP globally.  The parts of the global economy hit hardest include hospitality, tourism, entertainment, non-grocery retail, real estate, energy, automotive, and passenger transport. Fiscal/monetary support is needed for households, coping with unemployment, and preventing bankruptcies (such as government-backed loans).  Essential services most in demand include unemployment assistance, food production/distribution, utilities, medicine and PPE production, healthcare delivery, software and telecommunication services, logistics, and the payment side of the financial technology industry.  Globalization has been reversed and on-shoring is the current trend, meaning that producing supplies locally has shown a sudden dramatic increase.  Home-office technology, video streaming, online retail, healthcare, utilities, green energy, hygiene products, local manufacturing, and robotics are experiencing rapid growth. 

The attendees at the ICCA virtual event (primarily conference organizers) were polled about the trends they are observing.  At the macro level, they see:

• Acceleration of the digital economy, personal technology adoption, and e-commerce
• Continuation of the global recession, disruption of global supply chains, a large volume of remote workers/telecommuters, and challenges with vaccination logistics/distribution
• Increased concerns related to mental and physical health and long-term concerns regarding health and safety
• Shift of government investments into clean technology
• Shift from a shareholder to a stakeholder economy

At the micro level, anticipated trends related to international conferences include:

• Increasing opportunities to transform events using digital technologies, increased importance of event design/experience addressing customer needs, and evolution in business models for events
• Slow return of large events, lasting decrease in the average size of conventions, and the rise of micro-events
• Long-term decline in air travel globally
• Growth of hybrid events accompanied by an Increase in production costs
• Increased need to collect data to measure everything that happens during an event

APCDA Career Services Competencies

April 2020

After months of work, the Standards Taskforce is proud to announce the new list of APCDA Career Services Competencies.  This list is valuable for improving your skills and those of your co-workers.  Find out which competencies you have and which could use improvement.

This Competencies List is intended to be used in conjunction with the APCDA Glossary of Career Development Terms.  The definitions of terms will be helpful in understanding these competencies. 

These Competencies reference the APCDA Ethical Guidelines, which are available here: https://AsiaPacificCDA.org/ethical-guidelines

This list will be revised as needed.  Suggestions for additions and revisions should be submitted to Ethics@AsiaPacificCDA.org.