Gaining knowledge

In AIESEC we talk a lot about learning, which is one of the main focus areas and goals of our organization. I for myself experienced learning or personal development within AIESEC in a lot of occassions, that were quite different. I guess the biggest impacts for me happened on conferences. I still remember my first one, an X-Meeting, targeted to prepare people to go on an traineeship (that was the name of interships long time ago ;-) ).

The MC this year choose as scoreboard item to ensure personal development of the MC members. We regard(ed) it as highly important to be able to combine personal development with professional development. And I am one of the strong believers in the fact that "only" by working in the office you do not always learn and develop.

We are a group of nine people with diverse backgrounds and interests. Thats why we established knowledge days / hours. So the MC is grouping together and one of us shares her / his passion, which can be virtually everything. The goal is to challenge our worldview and get to know something new, that we probably never heard / thought of. For me this is a good way to eliminate my black spots, which I strongly see in some areas.

So the next knowledge sessions will be around topics like "symphonies" (Ernst - the specialist - will tell us how such major pieces in music are composed and at the end of the day we will listen to one) and history (Artur will tell us something about a certain time period as he is passionate about that topic) and finally it is planned to talk about "impressionism" and after that visit the current exhibition in Leopold Museum.

Yesterday we had a session on the topic "Trends in the world and implications on business". I prepared a powerpoint based on a huge paper developed by the World Resources Institute, UN Environmental Program and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development regarding the current status and trends in the next 50 years of following topics:

• People and Tomorrow‘s Markets
• Innovation
• Natural Capital
• Connections
• Roles and Responsibilities

We discovered a lot of black spots, believe me. In case you are interested in the session, you can download the ppt here. After the knowledge gaining the MC went to the discovering your talent session - meaning that we went to Karaoke, an interesting experience. The biggest hits were Rosamunde, Blau blau blau blüht der Enzian, Just a gigolo (now you can guess who sang what). Although we had several offers (one of Sony BMG) Alexis, Sascha, Ernst, Reini and I decided to continue our AIESEC career and then probably start off as a Schlagerband.

All in all a very interesting evening - I enjoyed to look over the "Tellerand". How do you gain knowledge within AIESEC guys?

yours

peter