EDITORIAL OVERVIEW – ISSUE 36
REIMAGINE NEWSLETTER: ISSUE 36
Introduction
Cturtle (said “sea turtle”) is the world’s largest community of international student graduates and alumni focused on lifetime employment support and engagement back in home countries. Started by an Australian entrepreneur in Vietnam in 2016, the network has grown to over 400,000+ members across 20 countries.
It was in 2015 that Asia based, Australian entrepreneur Shane Dillon started learning about the global business of international education and the struggle international students face transitioning from education abroad to employment in home countries. At the time he was a regional insurance executive looking to recruit returning Asian international student graduates and alumni who had studied in Australia to their portfolio of insurance businesses across the region. Finding it difficult to connect with large numbers of these returnee international student graduates and alumni for this purpose he launched the Australian Alumni Job Network (AAJN) in Vietnam in May 2016. Within a month 5,000+ alumni had registered on this web- based platform and he was getting requests from fresh graduates and alumni returning to other countries across Asia for support and from alumni of universities in United Kingdom, USA, New Zealand and Canada.
A quick brand change and the International Alumni Job Network (IAJN) was born and over the following 12 months over 100,000+ international student alumni joined the network across SE Asia, primarily in Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Singapore. The demand from international alumni for career support was overwhelming. IAJN raised a small amount of angel investment and attempted to engage its members universities to support a unified alumni network focused on employment outcomes for their international alumni who had returned to Asia. Despite repeated efforts and service pivots they could not get the support of universities around the world to support an employment focused alumni network.
A nomination and shortlisting for the inaugural PIEoneer Award (2017) was enough to convince Shane to quit his corporate life and become a fulltime entrepreneur, double down and pour his life savings into his idea and to focus on the problem of international student & alumni employment. Since launching they have been awarded the TOP100 Startups in Asia (2018) and shortlisted for the Australia China Business Awards (2019).
After countless conversations with universities in Australia and the USA a missing piece of the discussion was a reliable source of data on international student employment outcomes so they launched the International Student Employment and Satisfaction (ISEOS) research project which was supported by several study cluster organizations in Australia . This research has now surveyed over 20,000+ international alumni across Asia and collected over 2,000,000 data points on the international student experience at over 400 universities around the world. This data has formed the backbone of his second edtech venture UniAdvisor www.uniadvisor.co which he has co-founded with veteran international education marketer Paul Loftus (founder of eduKUDU).
As IAJN continued to grow (averaging 8,000 new members a month) they couldn’t develop the right product to engage university support to the platform and so in 2018 pivoted to an employer facing organization and rebranded to Cturtle (said “sea turtle”) where they continue to work on a fee based pricing model for companies across Asia looking for globally educated, local talent.
In markets across Asia there is a high demand for talent and the response from companies has been very positive.
Last week the team launched Cturtle+ “sea turtle plus” a unique opportunity for universities to invest in their international alumni through employment and professional networking events with a focus on supporting recent returnee graduates who often struggle the most to get the job they want after returning home due to lack of local market knowledge and professional network.
The fact that most jobs are not advertised really places international graduates at a disadvantage and this is again the companies attempt at a scalable solution to this issue that universities can support. Over the last 3 years Cturtle has run or supported over 30 events to support international graduates to grow their professional networks and engage with employers at home and to date over 15,000+ international alumni have attended these events.
The Cturtle platform has now supported over 50,000+ job applications and worked with over 1,000+ employment partners across Asia and had over 400,000+ international alumni register.
Despite the lack of support from the sector to international student employment Shane is encouraged by the continual demand from students to get a return on their investment and is confident it is only a matter of time before universities start to realize this is not just a talking point but a real issue that will start to affect future student enrolments.
Shane can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected]