Business Model & Ambition

35 Pages·2015·0.61 MB·English

AIESEC IN ROMANIA 2015.2016
Become
Business Model
Social Problem Definition
The Social Problem
Issue name: Career Development, Business Understanding.
After the YouthSpeak results, AIESEC’s global survey on youth’s path from Education to Employment, we realized that 43% of the
student from Romania want to become entrepreneurs and another 40% want to work in a multinational company which means
that almost all of them want to do one of these two things. However, students don’t get enough practical experience with their
university education, which is way too theoretical and has almost no space for skills and behaviors development.

The issue is, then, that university students have a huge gap between defining what they want for their professional careers
(based on lack of understanding of the business or entrepreneurial work) and the actual planning of their career development
steps. This results in a high unemployment rate, and furthermore in very low personal and professional satisfaction with the jobs
the students get in the future.
Needs & Opportunity Analysis
1. Market Needs
• Motivation for learning: which means that the students need to see the relevance in what they’re doing in order to have the right motivation
• Practice: one of the main issues for a student in Romania is that there’s nothing practical in their faculties which lead us to unprepared students for the
market.
• Being open to the market: it’s really hard for a common student to be visible for the market and also to know what’s going on in the market, so he can
understand the possibilities and trends happening and how it can connect to his future career.
• Possibility of doing something in your own country: another thing would be that most of the students leave after they finish their faculty just because they
don’t know what are their possibilities in their own country and don’t feel connected to Romania, thus they look forward to emigrate.
• Foreign Languages: because it’s impossible to work in a multinational or to have your own company without knowing at least one more language,
specifically English, and also it’s more important to practice it than to study it.
• Promotion: both companies and universities have a difficulties in actually reaching the students and having conversations with them.
• Attracting students: the universities have a really big problem in making the people that finished the highschool to apply for the local university.
• Career orientation: due the fact that the faculty is not enough for a student to figure out what they want in their career and a lot of them finish the faculty
without knowing what they will do, they need to find out from the first years of faculty at least in order to be able to practice
• Self- awareness: again, one of the most important things to know, because it’s way easier to decide what you can do I your future, what you should
improve, at what you’re good and what should be your next steps if you’re self-aware.
• Technical skills: nowadays the companies search qualified people to work on their company and only with theoretical skills it’s really hard to get all the
knowledge that you need.
• Long tern vision: it’s something that it’s missing from our thinking for generations and it’s really hard to build something and to take some actions if you
don’t see the end goal of that and that’s why it’s really important for the students to start having a long term vision.
Needs & Opportunity Analysis
2. Current Trends
• Economical instability: it affects a lot the whole population of Romania, but more than that the students, because maybe there
are a lot of times when they don’t have money to invest in their own development.
• Western countries module: this is something that we can actually work on an bring with our project. Western countries module,
referring to the universities module, where they do a lot of practice stuff which help them in their future.
• Bad media example: there is a big problem in Romanian society that you have nothing to watch on TV. There are only bad
examples and this affect the students because it restrict they long term thinking and their possibilities.
• Virtual orientation: day by day we are going virtual more and more and most of the people that are doing this are the students.
• Emigration of the young population: there are a lot of students that after they finish their faculties are leaving the country just
because of the salaries and because they don’t see the possibilities that Romania can offer.
• The wish to care more and do less: there are a lot of people aware and talking actively about the problems that they have and
Romania as a country has but few ones are doing nothing to improve those problems. There is a lack of motivation for actually
doing things to improve what’s not good.
• Entrepreneurship: more and more students want to become entrepreneurs after their faculties.
Needs & Opportunity Analysis
3. Root Causes
• Off-dated educational system: the model is inherited from the industrial era and hasn’t been adapted to meet today’s demand.
The students are taught lots of theory but very little practical activities are held, together with a lack of focus in actual skills and
competencies development.
• No long term thinking: The students themselves don’t have a long-term orientation for their lives, which includes their careers.
They don’t necessarily see the importance of investing in their professional development further than what is taught at universities
and to understand what the market is like, and thus they are moved by inertia and not planning their futures.
• Financial instability : Most of the university students don’t have a strong financial stability that allows them to develop the just
mentioned long-term thinking, thus focusing mostly in financial survival, which means accepting jobs and making career choices
based only or mostly in financial benefits, instead of what might be an actually planned career path.
Needs & Opportunity Analysis
4. Environmental Landscape (competitive analysis)
• Other NGO’s: there are a lot of NGO’s that are trying to tackle similar issues with relatively equivalent ideas and that come up
with the similar projects.
• The companies programs that are similar: some companies have their own campus engagement strategies. It can affect us
because the students are more likely prefer approaching a company than an student organization and they might also have the
chance after the companies programs to be hired there (being a more short-term oriented possibility for them).
• The universities: some universities are having a similar projects and they can have more visibility then us in the students market.
Needs & Opportunity Analysis
5. Barriers & Opportunities
Barriers

• AIESEC positioning in the student market: depending on the city, AIESEC might not have the most positive positioning in the
student market. Furthermore, we have different programs for them (Global Talent, Citizen and Leaders) that might compete
against each other and confuse them if not presented properly.

Opportunities

• Need for students in companies: there are a lot of companies that want to grow a lot in the near future and they don’t have
students with to hire with enough preparation and experience in order to do that.
• Internationalism: the thing that makes us unique as an organization is that we bring international students to learn together with
our students. They can bring new ideas, new perspectives and furthermore a mindset that “it can be done”.
• University Relationships: Most of the AIESEC Local Committees have long-term positive relations with their host universities, which
allows them to connect this project to the university in order to have a better positioning and endorsement.
Social Business Idea
The Project Idea – Social wise
Given the fact that the main issue identified is lack of career orientation and business understanding in university students, the
project idea is to create spaces, in an organized agenda, where the students can learn in theoretical and practical matters deeper
knowledge about different areas of business, broken down into categories (modules), and about entrepreneurship.

The content of the program’s agenda for each area of category of a business (module) is developed in partnership with companies
that work in the field, and with an entrepreneurship specialist organization, generating that way the connection between what
employers and entrepreneurs need and what the students will actually learn in the project.

Furthermore, the content of the project is not delivered in the classical “I teach, you learn””methodology, but in a 21st century new
methodology: co-learning. Each student group will have AIESEC international volunteer interns as “facilitators” that are not experts in
the subject, but are very interested and passionate about it. The interns will be trained in how to host co-learning spaces with the
university students, and then they’ll be responsible for keeping the track of the agenda and the activities that are supposed to
happen everyday, but not to directly “teach” the contents: everyone in the group (both beneficiary students and the interns) are
supposed to learn together through the different methodologies planned. Part of the practical experience is that in each group will
be composed by 2~3 teams of 2~3 students each, and they have to develop a project related to the area of knowledge in the 6
weeks of duration of the edition. Later on, the best team of each group would be awarded with a fee-free, short-term
entrepreneurship exchange experience sponsored by the company responsible for the module.

At the end, all the “graduated” participants from the project pass to be part of a “talent pool” where they can have contact with the
partner companies, and thus creating the opportunity for youth-employer connection and employability.