CEMS Roundtable: Students, Alumni, Teachers and Corporate partners brainstorming about the future of CEMS

• What are the current business trends influencing the CEMS Programme?
• What is the experience with the CEMS Programme seen from students', alumni's, teachers' and corporate partners' point of view?
• How can CEMS address current needs of the job market and prepare alumni that will star?

These are a few questions that were discussed during the CEMS Roundtable organized by Vojtech Oplestil and Ladislav Tyll at the University of Economics on 30th March 2017.

Each core CEMS Group (students, alumni, teachers and corporate business partners) was represented by the minimum of 4 participants. The whole program was organized in a very open-minded and informal atmosphere, which gave a space to many discussion and experience sharing.

Below you can find a few notes from the brainstorming evening:

What are top business trends these days? 

• focus on entrepreneurship
• digitalization trend
• increased competition of international business programs
• need of hard skills
• generation Y

How can CEMS address them?

• Building strong CEMS brand by offering excellent life-long education
• Minor specialization for CEMS students
• Increased offer of courses targeting deeper knowledge of technical disciplines
• Practically oriented guest speakers and lectures, e.g. real life case studies

How can CEMS Alumni Association support the future needs?

• Building the CEMS brand by organizing regular monthly CEMS professional events (e.g. Friday CEMS Stage) focused on the hottest topics that CEMS community is interested in
• At least once per year prepare big CEMS Community event with external top guest speakers

In the upcoming weeks, we will be gathering inputs from you, CEMS Alumni, about topics that are the most relevant to you, so we can plan the events for the 2nd half year of 2017 accordingly.

You can also have a look at the video with photos from this evening here

In case of any questions, let us know to: cemsalumni@seznam.cz

Pavlina on behalf of the CEMS Alumni Board Team

CSR initiative supported by CEMS corporate partner Reuters: "Šance pro děti"

Dear CEMS Alumni and members of CEMS Alumni Association Prague,

CEMS corporate partner Reuters - the renowned global news agency - together with several partner companies, organize in the Czech Republic for the 7th consecutive year its award-winning charitable project “Šance pro děti“ for children in need.

About 105 carefully selected images taken recently by Reuters photographers and collaborators are made available from 13^thApril to 24^th April 2015 in an online auction to be held at www.sanceprodeti.cz.

Successful bidders will receive their large format photos professionally printed and framed in high-quality aluminum frames.

This year, the public interested in supporting the project without actively engaging in the online auction, will have the possibility to contribute through DMS.
All collected proceeds will go to support orphanages, infant and child centers who take care of pre-school children. In addition, the proceeds will also go to one institution that helps families who took children from orphanages for foster, adoptive or host care.
It is important to note that all donated funds go without any intermediary from the donor directly to the accounts of the children's organizations. These institutions decide on how to use the proceeds most effectively – mainly to finance services and activities for children. The budgets received from the state cover only their regular operations  and are not enough to cover any special needs that children may have. For example: rehabilitation, animal assisted therapy, hippotherapy, therapeutic programs, purchase of medical equipment or equipment for physically or otherwise disabled children... etc.

Come and join us at www.sanceprodeti.cz and pick a picture that will make you proud!

Meet the Luxury - pictures from one of the best events recently

Luxury as a topic...
5 speakers...
Some 40 participants, both students and alumni...

What will be the future CEMS graduates like

I believe one of the roles of alumni is to bring CEMS stakeholders together and let them discuss openly their concerns and ideas.

Therefore, a month ago together with VŠE we organised a roundtable aimed at the following questions.

All relevant stakeholders were present:

• corporate partners (ŠKODA AUTO, HILTI)
• VŠE representatives (programme management + teachers)
• Students
• and us, alumni

Together, 16 people + one child with various backrounds, professional as well life experience and lots of motivation to share their views.

Together we created the following SWOT

What I personally found interesting was the shift from promotion of the programme (which was one of the key issues of the first roundtable in November 2011) towards the academic aspects of the programme. It seems like the core - curriculum and learning outputs - is coming to the fore of attention.

Analysis is just the first part. We moved on and created a list of tasks for all stakeholders.

It will be a responsibility of all the stakeholders to accept their tasks and support CEMS. Alumni will definitely play an active role!

Vojtech

P.S. If you want to see the full presentation please just send me an e-mail.

CEMS-L'Oréal Fellowship report: PORTRAIT OF A NEW GENERATION OF LEADERS

Today we present a common report of CEMS and one of CEMS' corporate partners. Below you can find the letter from the CEMS HQ.

Dear CEMS students and alumni,

We are delighted to be able to share with you the summary report of the results of the CEMS L’Oréal Fellowship: Portrait of a New Generation of Leaders.

We are confident that you will be very keen and excited to discover the different and sometimes unexpected facets of the CEMS students’ personalities. It is the first time ever that we have had at our disposal such a profound and rigorous analysis of the CEMS student profile. We are very grateful to the CEMS research team - Wolfgang Mayrhofer (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Odd Nordhaug (NHH Bergen) and Carlos Obeso (ESADE) - who are well-renowned for their talent and expertise on the subject.

The research project, comprising a series of quantitative and qualitative studies of the CEMS classes of 2008 and 2009, covers the following areas: choosing a job and first employer, life, career and competencies.

The quality and relevance of the resulting report underlines the academic excellence on which the CEMS alliance as a whole is based, from the contributions of the students interviewed through to the tireless work of the three professors mentioned above. In addition, this joint venture has also helped L’Oréal reinforce their position amongst the leaders in HR branding and enabled the CEMS alliance to convey a more positive message regarding the personal and professional values of tomorrow’s business leaders. Our thanks also go to the students who took part in the survey and interview stages of the project.

We are certainly more than open to new proposals of research operations in tandem with our corporate and academic partners, so we hope that this project will kick-start a series of in-depth studies produced by and in the name of CEMS stakeholders. It will be our pleasure to share any such projects with you in the future.

We wish you a pleasant read,

Kevin Titman
Communications Manager
CEMS Head Office.

The report: http://www.cems.org/cems/mailing/files/CEMS-LOreal_Summary_Report_FINAL.pdf