By Amber Bader Hayes
This year, year 10s had an opportunity to compete in the Australian Business Week (ABW) program. The students were grouped into seven groups of ten, and had to work together to win.
Teamwork and cooperation were essential to the success of each group, and each of the leadership members did a wonderful job aligning students’ positions to their strengths, communicating new information to the rest of the group, and organising tasks for everyone to do.
Communication was also extremely important between students not on the leadership teams so that they could get the information they needed, and figure out what they could do to help others.
This program helped students to develop their skills with working in groups, organisation and time management, and it also helped students to develop other microskills such as learning how to read and interpret the quarterly reports and how to put together a trade display, but also microskills that they can relate to their learning and the rest of their lives, which could include developing work ethic and meeting deadlines.
In the end, despite some groups possibly having internal conflicts or other setbacks, this week proved to be an enjoyable experience as it really brought everyone together in friendly competition, and especially group members in a productive environment. It really shows that people will unite under a shared goal.
A special thank you to all the mentors who gave up their time to guide all the students and teams, and well done to the teams who did not have a consistent mentor or a mentor at all. For the future, I would definitely recommend that teams have consistent mentors for the entire week, to make sure that they don’t have any prior commitments during this week so that all team members can contribute the whole time, and that organisation and communication are of the highest priority (this was drawn from personal experience).
I hope that by using these recommendations, future participants of Australian Business Week will have the best, most enjoyable experience possible.
By Selma Habibovic
Australian Business Week (ABW) is a fun filled and competitive program where students in Year 10 participate in a variety of activities which aim at enhancing the students critical and creative thinking skills. In return students earn an extra 10 SACE Credits towards Year 11.
It tests their time management and the ability to work as a part of a team to run a business simulation. It is a non-compulsory week where students can choose to participate or not, most students participated for the SACE Credits and others did it because they wanted to experience running a business. This year, the Year 10 students participated in running their own Cafés.
There were a variety of roles students could choose from in their teams, each had their own role from being a CEO, apart if the marketing or advertising teams and many more, there was a role for everyone. For me, it was exciting being a part of the marketing team as I was able to work with a few other peers to design the poster, make the video, name badges, logo, brochure, menu and business card.
Many students loved the competitive nature of the program as every day we would have a lecture to look at results from the previous day (previous quarters).
Overall Mr M and Mr K worked extremely hard to let us lead our own business and gave us many tips which would help not only in the program but in the future too.
Speaking on behalf of the other Year 10s, it is 100% recommended that if you have the chance to do it you should Australian Business Week. Whether you want to run a business in the future, or it is just for the SACE Credits, you do learn many skills.
