GLOBAL TALENT FOR YOUTH

So the first half of our experience as a national board focused on the professional products of our portfolio: Global Talent and Global Teacher, while working on the sustainability of Global Volunteer to rerun it. So we decided to focus from the start on these programs and put our strategies on bringing the change management to Local Committees (LCs) and making Global Talent and Global Teacher for Youth our main outgoing exchange programs.

We wanted to keep focusing on the short-term internships (6-12 weeks). However, we also improved our performance in the medium and long-term internships (13-78 weeks). Currently, mainly because of past results and the impact caused by the Global Volunteer product on the Belgian youth, not all Local Committees are able to sell the Talent and Teacher products.

Change Management

Since AIESEC in Belgium had to halt operations for the main product, which was Global Volunteer, the Global Talent and Teacher programs became the focus, but without a proper change management plan from past Member Committees terms, which brought us to a semester where we should not only focus on the development of the product in the local committees but at the same time build capacity of the membership through specific learning cycles and new materials built to ensure quality education. So, based on ADKAR Methodology (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement), we tried to map and plan activities and responsibilities inside the Member Committee and towards the Local Committees through the second semester of the term to make this change happen.

Awareness was built in the first touchpoint with the commission still in June of 2021; from then on, we set spaces to create desire and align the local committees’ planning for the upcoming semester focused on operational results for GT (such as the Global Talent Summit held at the beginning of July).

The national education cycle (NEC) plan was built around a series of asynchronous lectures about the internal processes and hard and soft skills required to work in sales and customer service. They were mainly delivered by the Member Committee and the Entity Support Team. We capitalized on the spaces that we usually had with the entity, like the conferences, summits, commission meetings, summits, and others, to build the ability using of practical spaces for practice and execution of tasks.

Currently, there is still much work to be done in the change management as not all our members know how to work with the product, and one of the main things that were left out is to build a strong culture of team and network between the different local committees.

Our Local Committees

Currently, there are 6 Local Committees, but in the second semester of 2021, because of merges, there were nine directors (responsible for sales of exchanges to the Belgian youth) selling the product in those six different offices, which meant that some were in exploring the same Market (even though they were various universities). So one of the main battles for the first semester of 2022 was to have one person per Local Committee, or at least to have them more specialized per product and not per university. So now we have only one person responsible for sales in each office.

The Belgian Market is quite extensive, and many students are interested in internships abroad, either for a short period or an extended period. Compared to previous years, we see a growth in people interested in and applying to our Global Talent and Global Teacher opportunities, even increasing results for the Global Teacher. But, as previously mentioned, despite our efforts, Local Committees miss the knowledge or the ability to upscale sales at the moment.

By focusing better on exploring the correct markets, overall product awareness, and information management, we believe in having built the knowledge necessary and the foundation for the next generation to have more results.