Written by Redwan
08 Mar 2015
After my earlier post regarding the advent of the local NFGL chapters of Swedish Institute, the participating universities have successfully conducted their events and have gone ahead planning with their upcoming ones. They have all been amazing with lot of feedback and photos being posted on the SI-NFGL Facebook page. The excitement is definitely real!
Our local chapter at Linnaeus University had organized the “Start Your Career” event, attracting majority of the NFGL members from our university and participants from Lund as well. The event had been organized in collaboration with Young Entrepreneurs & Associates, focusing on two key vital issues – securing jobs in Sweden and initiating your own start-up. The event welcomed the presence of Rob Floris, a senior Advisor from Arbetsförmedlingen (The Swedish Public Employment Services), who shared his valuable experience of how international students can target, hunt and successfully end of getting a job here in Sweden. He shed insights into the Swedish work culture, the general recruitment process and mainly the mistakes students make while looking for work. His session was lively, filled with discussions and a lot of humor and laughter, engaging the participants into the topic yet leaving scope for some fun!
Following by a delicious lunch was a session conducted by Erik Rosell, lecturer of Entrepreneurship at the Linnaeus University, who bring in tons of experience in the field of social and community business and start-ups, alongside years of working expertise within the industry. The topic of discussion was how one can start up his own business in Sweden and the key elements that affect this process were discussed. Erik conducted a stimulating, intensive and yet an interactive session where the NFGL participants had the opportunity to ask him questions from various different angles, leading to a fruitful engagement in the topic.
But…practice makes a man perfect, right?!
So it was time for the participants to expend some of their knowledge and understanding of the topic through a ‘business canvas model’. A popular framework used by entrepreneurs, this allows one to understand the in-depth picture of how a business runs by identifying its key stakeholders and processes and how it can be merged to create value. After half-an-hour of workshop, the students then presented their own start-up idea, based on the business canvas, to Erik who then facilitated the discussion and asked questions…leading to students getting a better grasp of what sort of information and insights are required to initiate one’s own dream start-up.
Khalil Balan, an SI scholar from Syria and Deputy Chair of Linnaeus University NFGL Chapter, then shared his life experience on how he started his own business and the problems he had tackled in order to become successful, inspiring the participants to take initiative of their own!
Andrea Strinic, Chairperson of the Linnaeus University SI-NFGL Chapter and a SI scholar from Bosnia, said “The event has been very successful with lot of enthusiastic minds getting involved in the topics. It had been a hard work for our Chapter members and an pleased to see it being successful. We thank our university administration, YEA, participants and everyone else who had helped us make this event successful”.
Is it the end? Naah…stay tuned. More events coming up soon here in the Greenest city in Europe! 😉
