Over the past year, students in Montpellier, France have been building their business aclament with the help of Dell team members. They’ve gotten a behind the scenes look at the world of enterprise and created their own business model.
Since September, Dell team members have been visiting a local school every Tuesday morning to help familiarize the students with all aspects of the company from marketing to sales to support. They also assisted students in a 10-school competition to see who can do the best job creating, marketing and selling a product.
“I’m coming from support so I helped them work on support, logistics, projections…this is my world so it was easy for me to help. Another guy from sales helps explain how to sell the products, come up with the best strategy to implement the product in the market… we try to help them based on our different capabilities,” said Sarah Antonicelli.
Sarah went on to say, “I try to make sure that the students feel confident because I know that it’s really difficult especially since we are in the south of France. We have a lot of unemployment which can make education quite difficult…sometimes their parents don’t speak French or come from another country so it’s easy for them to think that they can’t have a chance or support from other people.”
On May 12th, I was able to attend the final competition hosted at the Dell Montpellier Office. Groups conducted a presentation and were interviewed in front of a panel of judges.
Sebastien Picouret, who organized the program for Dell, told us that the interview part of the project was very important because it taught students how to sell themselves. “It was amazing to see the students’ comfort level increase throughout the year. They speak quite easily about their projects.”
While most of the students spoke only French, one group I talked to said they decided to do their presentation introduction in English to impress the judges.
The group Dell supported created a product called “Country Game.” It’s a trivia game focused on different origins and countries from across the world. Students are required to produce and sell 50 copies of their products by the end of the program. I’m proud to say that I contributed by purchasing one of their products. Just 49 left to go. I wish all the teams luck!
For more of the Dell YouthConnect program, visit Dell.com/youthconnect or join the conversation on Twitter at @Dell4Good.