How much can you learn in a day?
A bit of a diversion today – taking a day out of the office to work with Young Enterprise delivering a business education programme called “Sell for Success” to year 9 students at a local school.
Essentially, the programme is a business simulation game which takes the students through the challenge of launching a new product including all the associated business issues of finance, marketing, design, teamwork and presentation all in one day. Each class has a business adviser to help them through the day and at the end of the day the team have to present in front of all their peers before awards are made.
How much can you learn in a day? You’d be amazed! All of my colleagues working with the teams, including a lawyer, a marketing consultant and ex-bank manager felt that we had learned from our experience too – communicating what are day to day issues for us to students with little or no exposure to business and helping them succeed in a lively and vigorous competitive environment.
It taught me something else too – that our teachers are vastly undervalued. They do a difficult job working with diverse groups of students with differing backgrounds, behaviours and attitudes – not something I could do every day.
