I’ve had the privilege, bless or luck so far to study something that I really like – Business Administration – and during my studies, I’ve always heard stories about successful businessmen or women and how they achieved their career goals. What all these business-stars had in common? Skills!
Learning from their experience, I knew that I had to acquire some of my own, in order to be successful. How I managed to do that? By joining AIESEC, as one of the things.
Here are 5+1 skills that I actually developed since being in the organization.
1. Sales Skills
For the first time in my life, I was responsible for actually interacting with other organizations, making calls, attending meetings or following up with them, basically going through an actual sales process. I was still 19 years old when I first did this, with no experience at all. How crazy is that?! What I gained the most was confidence, as writing an email or pitching my ideas to other people looks so easy right now.
2. Teamwork
I’ve always liked interacting with other people, but I found it difficult sometimes to be on the same page or to strive for the same goals with 4-8 other peers. When I joined AIESEC, this changed! At first, I was part of a team of 5 people and together with them, I actually learned how to help and engage others or how to work with deadlines, for example, while also understanding what team development really means.
3. Team Management
Since my first experience got me all excited, I decided then to become a Team Leader and to manage a team of my own. Through this experience – and the ones that followed – I challenged myself by coordinating other people to achieve our goals, to design together our development path, and to ensure that we will deliver the projects on time and with the expected outcomes.
4. Leadership
More than leading a team, I managed to develop some personal leadership skills as well. I realized that understanding my personal strengths and using them to achieve my goals, being positive, taking responsibility to act upon the issues around me, or learning how to engage with other people, were valuable skills that I’m actually still using today.
5. Event Management
And these skills became very useful when I was put in the position of organizing events. So far, I was responsible for more than 15 of them and although it’s a very tough and challenging process, what I learned is that it is very helpful when it comes to my development, as well. I managed to coordinate people or to engage in activities that involved the promotion or the production of an event, something new to me when I first started. In the end, it was very rewarding to understand the process of making an event happen, while also learning new things about myself.
Unfortunately, I cannot express all the skills I have developed in AIESEC, in just one article. But what I know for sure is that my experience in the organization has still a lot to offer to me. And who knows, maybe it can inspire other people as well, because what I learned, besides gaining all these 5 skills, is how to become a storyteller and how to empower other people to develop themselves as I did!
This is a story by Yannis Sfakianakis, National Director of Talent Management, AIESEC in Romania. Do you want to know what is happening #behindthescenes of AIESEC? Then check out our next article soon!
You can also #JoinAIESEC here: join.aiesec.org.ro!
