President’s Report on Metizo’s 2nd Personal Development Conference
I thought you might like a summary of the Personal Development conference we held in partnership with Euromed Marseille Ecole de Management 2 & 3 October.
After the first Metizo personal development conference in Beijing in July 2005 I came to the conclusion that being highly selective was the best way to build the Metizo community and to move the field of personal development forward. This may not be possible in the future but that’s what I proposed to the Directors of Euromed Marseille. So we decided to hold a joint conference that would be international in nature, and add a second day, discuss personal development metrics and research and publish proceedings.
About 80 people in all took part in the event, with 30 to 40 people in the room at any one time, representing 9 countries on 4 continents. We had a highly selective cast of speakers and invested more than a thousand hours of organizational work before, during and after the event.
My grateful thanks to my school, Euromed Marseille, to the organizing team including student volunteers, to our speakers who volunteered their time and take on most of their travel costs, and to our sponsors.
Not only did ST Microelectronics give us financial support but they also generously provided two speaking occasions during the event.
Air France provided a travel budget for our speakers and participated in the conference.
Second Day Speakers with some participants
The Personal Development Vision at Euromed Marseille
Jean-Paul Leonardi, Vice-President and CEO of Euromed Marseille Ecole de Management, opened the meeting by tracing the history of the personal development initiative at Euromed Marseille.
Although there had been personal development workshops and a career center before 2002, the new team at the head of the school, composed of Jean-Paul Leonardi and Bernard Belletante, decided that personal development would be one of the key “pillars” of the education experience at Euromed. Given that all the top business schools in France say they do personal development, the vision was to make this an obligatory part of the program for all students and to link the Metizo program with Pro Act (action-learning projects), the free choice of studies, and the career activities for employability named Trajectoire (personal trajectory). Every student would therefore be able to take responsibility for developing himself or herself and employers would know that a Euromed student had gone through a specific set of experiences while having the maximum amount of freedom. As personal development is becoming a criterion of choice for students to choose a business school, Euromed Marseille communicated their unique approach during the recruiting process. The requirements of personal development are also validated by international standards: Equis for the European Union audits and AACSB for the American ones. After building the architecture starting in 2002, the school was recognized as having an advanced personal development approach by the Equis peer review board during the audit in 2005. This partially contributed to a remarkable advance of the school in the rankings among French business schools, where Euromed is in the top ten since 2004.
My own presentation showed that the Metizo vision goes back long before we began working with Euromed, but it wasn’t until we partnered with this school that Metizo was able to develop robust processes and tools and test the certification criteria that we had set. Metizo’s partnership in the next stage of partnership will go beyond the innovation stage to creating a knowledge base around personal development in partnership with other business schools and with companies.
The afternoon of first day of the conference two Euromed Professors, Olivier Pelazza and Vincent Frey showed participants how the different parts of the Euromed process come together by interviewing students who talked of their experiences in Metizo, ProAct, choosing internships and international studies and being helped by Trajectoire for their career strategies.
Looking to the future, Bernard Belletante, Dean of Euromed Marseille talked about the challenges facing a school that invests heavily in personal development. The educational proof is to show that personal development produces change: the students going in are not the same as the students leaving the school. The value must also be proved: do companies value personal development over other educational acquisitions? Dean Belletante is an economist and he launched an economist’s challenge to the audience: “Euromed needs more than anecdotal evidence that the programs work: research must be done. Prove to me that our investment has a return!”
- The next section of the conference report, covering the first major theme of “The Impact of Technology on Personal Development” is online here.
- The report on the second main theme, “Corporate Best Practice”, is online here.