Quality Management and entrepreneurial skills session in RYLA

  The second day of the Rotaract Youth Leadership Award (RYLA) three days event, included a very interesting session about Entrepreneurship conducted by Dr. Pierre Gideon. Dr. Gideon gave a small briefing about his career and how he ended up establishing the Antoniette college branches in Lebanon after his work and study experience in France. The session was entitled: “Quality Management and entrepreneurial skills” where he talked about the preparations colleges should undermine in order to prepare new generation of entrepreneurships.

  Dr. Gideon began his session with a chart diagram explaining the life of an individual. We begin on point 0 on the x-axis but then go up to a certain point before we begin deteriorate and fall on the y-axis until we seize to exist. But which is the teaching phase? The answer by Mr. Gideon was: “We don’t only learn in schools. We learn everywhere, for we go through a lifelong learning.” Afterwards, there was a classification of values which are essential to establish a pioneer work. This classification allowed the participants to distinguish between social, interpersonal, individual, and organizational values.

  Then the dialogue was altered to talk more in depth about the entrepreneurship, the quality of the person in charge and the business. “It should be in the job description of each individual to get to customer satisfaction, and hence this needs a reflex for attaining quality”, with this, Dr. Gideon explained the most important skills of the entrepreneur. Some participants gave life examples about their thoughts and ideas for projects to be done.

  After the break, the focus speech was about universities. Historically, universities used the passing knowledge technique. This was out of date, and hence the universities shifted to research technique. But research is not enough now, and hence entrepreneurship is the new field where universities are researching. In order to prepare students for the market, universities should obtain a triangular method of teaching: passing knowledge, research and entrepreneurship. There was also some discussion about the problems facing the teaching process. They concluded that the problem is in the passive way of teaching. Teaching is more than giving classes; it is about showing knowledge &preparing new generations for the markets.

  “The major we learn is not for lifetime, it is rather for the startup in the market,  and then we have to learn something  more  for a career”, Dr. Gideon said. This was after a lifetime example when he used to work in an internet company in the eighties while his boss had studied agriculture. The example was to support the idea that you never know where you will end up in career life but you will undermine many shifts and changes in your career that will lead you to completely different fields!

  This session was ended with a participants’ commentary about social media and the need to be updated on the internet and the Web 2.0 in order to have a mark in the new generation market.