My AEISEC Story!

A few weeks ago a youth empowerment organisation called me to ask if I could participate in a university workshop as part of a leadership development program for university students, which was called Speedy Success in 90.  Their intent was to host an online event, where they would introduce me as an employment expert for approximately 30 USYD students who were keen to develop and prepare themselves for workforce entry.  These students represented a number of industries like HR, Engineering, Accounting, Medical Science and Marketing.

Their organisation is called AIESEC.  Who are they?  They are an international youth-run, non-governmental and not-for-profit organization that provides young people with leadership development, cross-cultural internships, and global volunteer exchange experiences. The organization focuses on empowering young people to make a progressive social impact.  

Needless to say I was excited to work with them!

The premise was that the event would be held online for 90 minutes, with each participant being given the opportunity to provide an “elevator pitch”, and also to attend three short workshops with three different employment experts presenting different topics such as Managing Conflict, Confidence in Interviews, etc.

While I’ve been asked to do a number of speaking engagements, the AIESEC organising group by far was the most organised and prepared in how they dealt with me.  Nareuchaya and Jessica held a short “scene setting” meeting with me, to explain their purpose, their workshop format and to ask me how I’d prefer to position my business to their audience, (and also I suspect to assess if I was passionate enough to participate and not cancel last minute which was very wise of them).  Then they had a 2nd meeting with me to review my slide content for my 30 second introduction and my speaking topic which was “Conflict Resolution in the Workplace”.  Despite me misunderstanding the content objective, meaning I showed them content that was different than what they expected, they were gracious with me when I realised my mistake, and really the team was completely professional with me every step of the way.  And I fixed my content right away.

Here’s where I was impressed:  Nareuchaya did a great job in choosing quality speakers for this workshop, as we all had different areas of expertise to offer to the audience. I’m not sure how much Nareuchaya’s team did to prepare the attendees, but I also found them to be very engaging, preparing and delivering their 30 second elevator pitch, which by the way showed a lovely combination of vulnerability by stating a little bit about themselves (i.e. cat lover, introverted, etc) as well as their career aspirations.  During the speaker presentations, they asked thoughtful questions and showed their curiosity about the workplace and other potential pitfalls they might face.  This also demonstrated how switched on they were in carving out their future.

I was also impressed with the level of detail the AIESEC planning group took into consideration, from the look of our Zoom video backgrounds, to rehearsing the timing of our own 30 second elevator pitch.  On the day of the event, I rang Nareuchaya in the morning to ask where I could find the zoom link, and while another person was responsible for this, she politely told me she would get on that right away.  Within 15 minutes, the zoom link was in my inbox with a lovely email from the person saying how excited they were to welcome me at the event later that day.  I was impressed that she kept her cool despite an obvious oversight.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing out real life work problems with the students, potential approaches they could take to these problems, like when you disagree with the boss, or how to approach an uncooperative co-worker or even how to handle bullying in the workplace.  Each of the participants was open to different ways of solving these problems while also paying attention to how certain responses create a good or bad perception of them at work. I could see the lightbulbs go on as we talked through the various scenarios and responses.

It goes without saying the whole event ran on schedule, including the networking bit, which would normally be a bit harder to wrangle but they had someone ducking into each of the breakout rooms politely reminding them how much time was left before all had to re-join the main group.  Overall, I was highly impressed with the AIESEC team’s organisation, communication and leadership for this event and I can see a bright future ahead for the organisers and participants in the AIESEC program.