How the Opportunities at Art of Smart Helped Nivaaz get a Job at Canva!

Often tutoring is seen as a casual gig you do while at university that provides little opportunity for further employment.

Oh, how wrong this assumption is!

Meet Nivaaz: She’s currently studying a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at UNSW. She began as a tutor and worked her way up to become a recruiter, resource developer and more! All and all Nivaaz has worked for Art of Smart for 3 years.

By taking on further roles at Art of Smart, she was able to develop valuable skills that she wasn’t being taught at University.

Want to find out how these same skills led to her nailing an awesome new job at Canva?

Let’s hear from Nivaaz herself:  

How did you get hired at Canva and what does your job entail?

I actually got the job because one of their senior employees was giving a lecture at my Uni.  Due to the skills that I had learnt at Art of Smart, I had enough work experience to go and talk to her. This eventually led to my employment!

For those that don’t know, Canva is an easy to use graphic design tool. It is extremely popular across various fields and industries.

I’m currently working on the onboarding sequence for Canva. This means I need to understand the users of Canva and how to communicate with them.

My work with different kinds of people such as tutors/teachers/resource makers/students at Art of Smart has helped me with this aspect of my role so much!

So what roles did you work at Art of Smart exactly?

For Nivaaz, her time at Art of Smart went through four stages of employment.

See, the great thing about Art of Smart is there are opportunities for everyone at any level – I had only been at AOS for 6 months when I got offered roles as a team leader and recruiter!

Within each of her roles, Nivaaz had different experiences and was able to garner different skills relevant to her future career.

What sort of skills did you learn within these jobs?

• Tutoring: Here, I learnt how to be articulate, explain anything simply and communicate with people from all kinds of backgrounds about all different kinds of topics.
• Team Leader: In this role, I was mentoring a group of over 30 coaches. It helped me understand how to build effective relationships and how to articulate feedback so that people are motivated to improve.
• Recruitment Officer: As an RO, I was tasked with interviewing and hiring potential tutors. This role forced me to be super organised, on top of emailing all the time, and taught me how to multi-task really well. It also allowed me to dabble into other parts of the business like writing coach bios, suggesting new implementations for recruitment and even choosing who to interview.
• Resource Developer: As a resource developer, I gained a lot of knowledge in regards to google scripts. As you saw previously, this is VERY relevant to my new gig at Canva.

What other skills did you learn at Art of Smart that you use in your new job?

For Nivaaz, getting further involved at Art of Smart was greatly condusive to developing her skills. Specifically in regards to coding and software, a major part of her new role at Canva.

I learnt coding from scratch. I wanted to learn while I was at University, but things just kept on getting in the way. Luckily, I told Rowan about this!

Rowan is the CEO of Art of Smart and the author of ‘Secrets to HSC Success Revealed’. He’s worked with over 10,000 students and completed 10+ years of HSC research.

He had a side project that was perfect for me: developing an ATAR calculator.

He taught me about developing a product, understanding design and set me up with a mentor. This helped me develop my coding skills!

In fact, the coding languages I learnt developing the ATAR calculator at Art of Smart are the exact ones I use in my new role at Canva!

I also had a startup at one point that involved building design software. What I had learnt at AOS proved extremely useful here too. 

I was able to do this because at Art of Smart they’re willing to give people opportunities to prove themselves.

The whole team, including Rowan himself, is SUPER accessible. I was able to take on way more responsibilities and learning opportunities than I would of in another job.

How would you recommend new Art of Smart employees best develop their skills?

Jump into every opportunity and apply for everything.

Give everything a go – everyone is going to lift you up and be encouraging.  AOS is a safe place to explore new areas and skills that you might be scared to. And because we’re small you’ll learn way more than you bargained for.

At Art of Smart, we have various opportunities for training, whether online or in the form of on campus coach conferences.

You would honestly be missing out on so much if you didn’t attend the training session or try a role that you know nothing about or haven’t done before!

What are you waiting for?

Looking for a job to help you get into your dream career?

We’re looking for world-class tutors and mentors to join our team! 

We offer tutoring and mentoring for Years K-12 in a large variety of subjects, with personalised lessons conducted one-on-one in students homes or at our state of the art campus in Hornsby!

To find out more and apply to become an Art of Smart coach get in touch today!