Eye on Young Enterprise
Is this seat taken? Carol Fitzsimons, Chief Executive of Young Enterprise NI, charts the international pedigree behind the YE Academy, delivering enterprise education directly to young people all over Northern Ireland. for the next 100 years. An opportunity to share pilot work from other nations. An opportunity to connect with each other. I brought the LMS idea back and we tested it out. A good idea for the future. Maybe one day. We understood the potential but realised the investment of time needed for system development to make it worthwhile. Maybe it wasn’t our time yet.
BERLIN, OCTOBER 2019 The days of travel and international conferences. 300 international delegates. Where to sit? I sat down next to Alison Gottsch-Walton, a decision I’ve rejoiced in over the last year. Call it destiny, fate, serendipity or chance, I got lucky. Over the next 3 days, Alison and I discussed the new project she was working on – a pilot Learning Management System (LMS), allowing students and educators to access enterprise education directly. She introduced me to Alex from Romania and Hala from Bahrain who had been involved in the initial testing. The conference was to celebrate 100 years of Junior Achievement – Young Enterprise. Over 300 delegates from the global not-for-profit network that today serves more than 12 million young people in over 100 countries. An opportunity to look back on 100 years of achievement and more importantly plan
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BELFAST, MARCH 2020 Schools closed. We were not the first country it happened to. There had been time to plan. We had watched our colleagues in Italy adapt as Covid-19 hit and had prepared basic online activities which launched the day schools closed. A quick fix. The requirement of an LMS to be able to manage and scale more sophisticated content became immediately clear. The Board quickly gave the green light to for the investment, I gave Alison a call and we had our logins. We were ready to build our own system the only way we know how - ‘learning by doing’ - the Young Enterprise motto. Everyone had a role to play. Our Finance team took on login creation and admin support. They gave Alex in Romania a call and bonded over a shared passion for Excel and process for managing thousands of logins. The delivery team created video content of both themselves and volunteers. A small team worked on the back end of the LMS, building the online content. The marketing team created explainer videos to encourage teachers to sign up. The programmes retained the ethos at the heart of Young Enterprise – developing entrepreneurial skills in young people. The skills we have valued most as employers over the last year of creativity, resilience, creativity, adaptability. ONE YEAR ON A TechEd charity. 7 programmes for both Primary and Post Primary created digitally, all in-house. 40,000 young people have registered to date. Over 200 schools involved. A new way of working implemented at speed with local educators and direct to students, at a time when there was a real need to let young people continue to develop those skills
we need as employers, at a time when it was almost impossible for them to do so. Digital will not replace in-person learning, any more than the internet has replaced books, or streaming has replaced vinyl (because it really hasn’t!). Digital brings opportunities to scale and to extend learning. It allows the charity to ensure the precious face-to-face time in school is used for the high impact interventions, time with business volunteers, and interactive, collaborative learning. We look forward to getting back into the schools, back to face-to-face learning, back to having volunteers from across NI business tell their stories of resilience and creativity over the last year. Our LMS – YE Academy – is here to stay to complement and supplement the work we do. Our bonds with our global colleagues are strengthened and we continue to learn from global shared practice in enterprise education. If you want to learn more about how your business can back the work of Young Enterprise NI, get in touch.
www.yeni.co.uk/partnership-opportunities