In return for your skills, enthusiasm and commitment,
we will offer you one of the most challenging and rewarding
experiences of your life. You will work closely with a number
of small businesses, providing one-to-one mentoring support
to each of them. This experience will open you up to new challenges
in a completely new environment, and will give you a fascinating
range of case studies to learn from and to draw upon during
the rest of your career.
You will see contrasts in every sphere: attitudes
to work (and play), regulation, competitors, customers, suppliers,
logistics, technology; the only thing that will be really
familiar will be the English language! You will work with
companies from a range of sectors that could include IT, telecoms,
financial services, logistics, manufacturing, hospitality,
tourism and many others. In each case we will carefully match
you with companies whose needs mirror what you have to offer.
We don't expect you to come in and offer technical
support, or to spend days hunched behind a computer screen,
fixing someone's financial projections. Nor do we expect you
to behave like a teacher and spend hours at a time reciting
management theories or drawing complex diagrams. Your role
is somewhere between that of a consultant and a mentor. You
are there as a sounding board, someone who has experience
that is relevant to a person's situation and can offer views
and ideas.
You might be sitting down with someone who
has been running a mobile phone business for a number of years,
but wants to develop their ideas about how to market their
outlets to new customers. You can help them to explore and
develop their own ideas, as well as suggesting new angles.
A fresh perspective, combined with experience of a different
market and culture, is guaranteed to generate some interesting
outcomes.
Alternatively, you might be working with
someone whose lack of formal education is holding them back
from accessing bank finance, because they are unable to write
a compelling business plan. In this case, your input might
be around helping them to structure and write a short document,
perhaps over the course of a few afternoon sessions spread
out over several weeks.
