Empower Your Future: Leadership, Soft Skills & Membership Maximizer Workshop

Empower Your Future is an intensive, interactive workshop created to show students and emerging engineers how to leverage their IEEE membership into a strategic catalyst for technical mastery, professional development, and leadership. The session covers the full student-to-professional journey through three focused segments: Leveraging IEEE Memberships & Technical Societies: María Camila Osorno (Chair of Com&Com, Universidad del Norte) will share her personal path and roadmap for seizing IEEE opportunities. Attendees will learn how technical chapters relevant to Systems Engineering and computing fields such as Computer Society (CS), Communications Society (ComSoc), and the Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) enable members to build niche technical expertise, connect with focused professional networks, and drive early career visibility. Hands-On Soft Skills & Communication Workshop: Led by Yessy Coronel (Soft Skills Specialist), this segment breaks away from conventional lectures through interactive group activities focused on assertive communication, public speaking, and executive presence. Leadership & The Transition to Industry: Sebastián Lizarazo (Chair of IEEE Young Professionals ColCaribe) will dissect the essential traits of modern leadership and introduce IEEE Young Professionals (YP) as the bridge between university life and the professional world. He will showcase high-impact regional initiatives from ColCaribe including casual networking gatherings (after hours, bowling events) and premier technical challenges such as collaborative hackathons with industry partners like Databricks.