From crafting personalized scholarship solutions to breaking a world record in a bold outdoor campaign, the students tackled the challenges with a fresh Gen Z mindset.
Unlocking student potential through effective partnerships
Collaborations between businesses and students are beneficial for all involved parties. They provide a unique opportunity to discover fresh perspectives and ideas from the talent of the future.
According to Hostinger’s Employer Branding Specialist Monika Karpavičiūtė, “The Hostinger Challenge uncovered the students’ innate ability to identify and leverage emerging trends and forecast the expectations of Gen Z talent entering the job market. At the same time, KTU students gained valuable project management experience and had the chance to contribute to an international product.”
KTU associate professor Dr. Meda Andrijauskienė adds to the importance of students acquiring hands-on experience in their early years of study.
“Every spring semester, I have the chance to work with KTU GIFTed students. Naturally, I feel responsible for delivering the most valuable project management experience. I strongly believe that this would be impossible without our business partners that can show the students how it works in the real world. This time, the students had to perform a detailed situation analysis and offer solution alternatives. They did everything, including formulating project goals and risks, determining the success criteria, and developing their own web page to present their project plans and outcomes.”
Distributing knowledge through original TikTok content
Five strong teams tackled the Hostinger Challenge – each could pick from five proposed problems. The winners presented content strategies for Hostinger Academy’s TikTok Channel.
Their reasoning was simple: with over 1 billion active users worldwide, TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms. This large user base presents a significant opportunity for companies to reach and engage with a wide audience, including potential customers and employees.
Mantas Stankaitis, captain of the winning team, says that the challenge matched the team’s expectations. As they were both familiar with and interested in TikTok, the opportunity to create a strategy for Hostinger’s account seemed like the perfect chance to showcase their skills.
“We saw an opportunity to disseminate knowledge and understanding of internet technologies to an audience that we’re also a part of,” Mantas shares. “The biggest challenge was coming up with original content that would have the potential to be successful on the platform. We conducted a thorough analysis and generated ideas based on both Hostinger’s brand guidelines and the TikTok trends.”
Transformative Ideation
The other teams picked different problems proposed by Hostinger. Two of them tackled employer branding challenges to attract Gen Z talent – one group developed a scholarship program, while the other was prepared to set a Guinness World Record for the highest altitude web development live stream.
The two final teams took on the mission to make hybrid work more pleasurable for Hostinger employees – by providing actionable engineering changes and developing an internal motivational reward system.
Both Hostinger and KTU students see a lot of sense in such collaborative activities. The company will analyse the proposed solutions further over the summer and return to them in September when the new academic year begins.
