I am at Brussels airport, flying home after our first annual GET-IT Conference, which was themed around “e-skills development for young entrepreneurs” and I am still very thrilled and excited about the 2 days we have spent together. The event took place at the Brussels HP office on September 18-19.

As you probably remember from my earlier blog entries, our Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT (GET-IT) is designed for under - or unemployed youth (aged 16-25) in underserved communities. We want to develop their IT and business skills so that they become more qualified for employment and better placed to create their own business.

We decided to hold a conference for our GET-IT network to bring them together from around Europe, Middle East and Africa, to foster knowledge exchange and best practise sharing amongst the group and discuss together how to grow GET-IT further in the most meaningful way. 

Prior to the conference, we requested feedback from our network and results from our first year show that overall, our 70 GET-IT partners trained over 8300 young graduates and around 40% found a job after having attendend the courses. Wow, I can only say – great results, if you ask me!

During the conference we had a great mix of GET-IT centers, who have joined the network in 2007, when we launched our social flagship programme, but also centers that joined the network this year. In total GET-IT centers from more than 20 countries participated. We had young entrepreneurs, who attended  the GET-IT training, who are the living example that the training works. They were able to launch successful businesses, created jobs for others and are even expanding their operations internationally now. Watch our newly launched GET-IT video, which is posted on our GET-IT website http://www.graduate-training-through-it.net/. Overall we had 41 partipants from 20 countries.

I also learned a lot in the workshop sessions, where we brainstormed about how to increase the impact of the training. This session was very benefical as we are always aiming at developing this programme further for the best local impact. But we also heard very intersting perspectives from the European Commission officials, who discuss the crucial role of e-skills and competences for Europe’s future as well as best practises from our highly valued partners of HP like JA-YE that discussed how the GET-IT curriculum helps advance their existing graduate programmes.

We heard from UNIDO, with whom we formed a partnership to strengthen the GET-IT programme in Africa, that some ICT students have not gotten the chance to be in front of a personal computer for 3 years! It is time to change that!

But clearly, one of the highlights was to hear from the GET-IT centers themselves, how they address entrepreneurship skill training. Great best practise sharing. And it is rewarding to see that GET-IT is so modular, that it adds value to the economic development in each country. We are currently running the programme in 25 countries with 70 partners.

The success of this conference supports us in our goal to increase the GET-IT network further. We want to establish 30 additional GET-IT centres and reach more than 500,000 students in total by 2010 through our GET IT centre network. I know it sounds like a high goal but only high goals enable you to stretch and go even further. I guess it is like chocolate: if you had one piece you want more and more.

To reach as many students as possible with GET-IT have been working on a web portal and presented the BETA version to the conference participants. The portal enables even those students who cannot access a GET-IT centre to still benefit from the programme through various features like the online game or video clips. I am particularly excited about this web portal because it allows us to reach more students in need for entrepreneurship skills. And I am proud to be part of this programme.

Conference participants welcomed the portal and showed tremendous interest in it. We will have a lot of partners testing it now and we hope to get valuable feedback to further advance the game. I must admit that I am a little bit jealous that such entertaining education tools have not existed when I was a graduate. It is amazing how much easier it seems to be for young people to pick up basic business and entrepreneurship principles through such tools.

And last but not least, I am particularly proud about our participants’and partners’ feedback that HP walks the talk with its strong social investment strategy and programmes.

Daniela Opp, Manager, Social Investments and Economic Development, HP EMEA