The first ten years after graduation from university can be challenging for young professionals. Employment searches, new jobs, professional growth, career development, and life status changes are common experiences for many recent graduates. Going through these challenges can be daunting but IEEE members never have to go through these experiences alone or uninformed.

IEEE Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD) was created in 1996 as a membership program to help students transition to young professionals within the larger IEEE community. IEEE young professionals are automatically added to the GOLD member community as they graduate.

Our constant target is to show for young members that IEEE does a lot for them. First of all, it is organizing technical or social events. Unfortunately it has only a limited effect. We have serious problems in organizing social events that would enable the GOLDies to meet each other. We have trouble finding volunteers to organize such events. Its very difficult in our largest territory to find topics interesting for more people. So, we are looking for some general topic interesting for everybody. One of the topic is "addition (soft) skills".

Many people at early stages of their careers feel that IEEE is not important for them and that volunteering for the profession is not worth. It is even hard to make them attend meetings. The challenge is how to reach people from wide Russia, not easily arriving to single destination for meeting. Social networking tools at the Web is appropriate solution but we need more personal contacts. Virtual meetings lack many of the benefits that we should provide.

We are thinking about organizing biannual face-to-face GOLD meeting for GOLDies and GSMs. We need to motivate them because there was no activity organized by GOLDies members in Russia outside Siberia. During this meetings we can discuss about what we can organize as activities in a near future.

The main problem is how to get more GSM members involved in active work of the GOLD affinity group. We should try to recruit more GSM members and make some core group within them. We need more members from industry compare academia. Up to now we have far to few members outside academia. We plan to attempt to solve this issue by visiting big companies and presenting IEEE. This will be co-organized with the Industrial Relations Committee of the Russia Siberia Section.

IEEE GOLD is a vibrant community of engineers, scientists, and technical experts with member representation across the globe and throughout IEEE societies.

JOIN THE IEEE – IT IS A GOOD SOCIETY!!!