Wise Words from Liz King

Liz King

Liz King, a sought after event planner from New York took the time to hang out in a Starbucks and Skype with some students from BCIT. Tina Nguyen and Albert Yee led MPI BCIT's February General Meeting and invited Liz to share her experience. Exceeding our expectations, Liz offered golden advice on both how to connect with people in business and the steps to creating a personal brand!



As students we always want to know… where do we start? How do we break into the industry? How do we meet people in the industry? The answer? Twitter. Liz King had some great (and simple) advice that anyone can follow – literally!

King talked about how following interesting people and following the people they are following is a great way to learn about what going on in the industry. Use hashtags specific to an industry to discover trends or hot topics. After sitting back and watching, Liz started to share content she was interested in and then started engaging and commenting on other peoples content. Eventually, Liz began to create her own content. She said, “it’s a great way to meet people!”

Wait, who are you?

Another specialty of Liz’s – as if she didn’t already do enough! – is discussing personal branding. Now, as a student at BCIT we’ve all heard the spiel from Tracey, but a personal brand really is important!! Liz’s tips are:

•  Figure out what is unique about YOU. Something simple but distinguishing.
• Communicate who you are quickly. Someone should know something about you after only 10-15 seconds on your page. Capture them.
• Be prepared to brag a bit! Now is not a time to be modest.

Use these tips in your LinkedIn profile, Twitter bio and other social media tools (Facebook is generally for personal use – check your privacy settings!) and you will be on the road to making a professional online first impression.

Technology, you move to fast!

Now the question came up from an audience member: how do you learn about all this new technology flying out into cyberspace? Her answer: techy blogs! Sites such as mashable.com and techcrunch.com offer information on the latest trends in technology. The latest thing according to Liz? RFID.

My new favourite tool? Word clouds.

From Student to Industry

A common theme of things to make sure you have when entering the workforce is experience. Thankfully, Liz considers education experience! Students are always wondering how to nail down that dream job even though they have no industry experience. Liz’s advice is always be learning. Although having an education and learning as much as you can is important, it’s not always what you know, but who you know.

Making connections is vital in business and easier to make than you may think! Networking and volunteering are two great ways to meet great people. Meeting them is half the battle, it’s very important that once you’ve met them you:

• Follow up!
• Add them on LinkedIn with a PERSONALIZED message.
• Ask them to meet for coffee. 

Now is the perfect time to play the student card and learn as much as you can from industry members willing to share.

The MPI BCIT team would like to thank Liz King for chatting with us and we hope to hear from her again!

Want to learn more about Liz? Check out her company page: http://lizkingevents.com

Leave a comment and let us know what you think!