Read All About this Sprint

What are Career Bytes and How Did We Create this Toolkit?
Career Bytes, very short video interviews of career professionals, have been a mainstay of Nortel LearniT's educational model for many years. The beauty Career Bytes is creation -- from start to finish -- by students. Interview questions are student-driven. Interviews are conducted by students while other students shoot, edit, and produce the final results. Who better to wonder about, investigate and communicate the "ins" and "outs" of a career, than the students that may one day be following that career path? And ... who better to shoot, edit, and produce the segments than "digital natives" of the 21st century information world? We set out to do it via a "sprint", a concentrated, one-week effort to write, plan, and shoot two videos: one that would answer the question "HOW do you make a Career Bytes video?" and the second to answer "WHY use Career Bytes?" Plus we would put those videos into a Nortel LearniT web site-based Career Bytes Toolkit to organize and share EVERYTHING you'd ever need or want to create your own Career Bytes in one central location. The challenge was on. The sprint began. Why do they call it a sprint? That was the pace. A sprint is an intense "push" that brings people together to focus their energies and synergy on one task. In some cases, people are locked into a room until the project is completed. In our case, we spent many long hours at the Nortel LearniT office in Herndon, Virginia the week of December 17-21, 2007. This involved hours of brainstorming, writing scripts, heading out on location to shoot interviews, bringing people to our own studio for interviews, writing and reviewing resources and blogging.The week pulled together 10 creative minds to accomplish this task. Young adults outnumbered other participants by more than 2 to 1. ALL brought their own talents and perspectives to the task. Oh ... and there was also lots of laughter, pizza, sodas, singing, and memories made. You can see our team in action and on pizza break, meet the participants and also visit a web site that explains the sprint concept in more detail. What's becoming more apparent is that there are many opportunities to capture Career Bytes. Wherever we find people doing their jobs, we have the raw materials for a Career Bytes video. This includes professionals coming together for conferences ... professionals working in the school ... professionals delivering mail ... even professionals training for a marathon. Career Bytes also held a key spot in NASA's Future Forums Panel discussions running throughout 2008 highlighting NASA'S 50th Anniversary. By the end of week one, all videos were shot, all interviews completed, most resources reviewed or written, the skeletal web page complete, and folders filled with all needed "bits and pieces." With several more weeks' work, both videos and the toolkit were completed. The sprint was over, but the long run--the race to successful results--is just beginning for every team that creates Career Bytes!!