Liselotte Bibow, Noah Mullen & Nicole Kerrigan from Scoil Chaitriona If you’ve ever watched the programme ‘Dragon’s Den’ then you’ll know just how hard it can be to impress the dragons. Sometimes the budding entrepreneurs find themselves leaving the room with nothing. But occasionally the ideas are so good, the bidding gets quite competitive with the investors rushing to invest in the new business ideas.
And that’s exactly what happened at the AIB/Junior Achievement Ireland ‘Invest in Me’ event with a group of schoolchildren in 4th, 5th and 6th class in Scoil Chaitríona on Baggot Street in Dublin.
The 20 students came into Bankcentre and worked with 10 AIB volunteers to design new business ideas based around the four Ps of marketing – Product, Price, Promotion and Place. These ideas ranged from an educational Rubik’s cube, a GPS high visibility safety jacket to an intuitive speaking word scanner for visually impaired people.
“The level of presentations showed that the kids really worked hard on the product design, the research and also on their presentation skills,” says Eoghan O’Neill of Corporate Banking and one of the dragons for the day.
The Invest in Me volunteers – from left: Seán Ó Conaill, Edward O’Sullivan, Stephen McGurn, Conor Sweeney, Gareth Keogh, Elisha Melody, David Kilbride, Sean Mulvey & Sandra Kennerk“We dragons found ourselves fighting over each investment looking to outbid each other which was a great endorsement of the quality of the ideas. All the days of hard work building up to the eventual presentation to the dragons really showed on the day and most importantly it was great fun.“
Another dragon was Colm ‘The Gooch’ Cooper, AIB’s Youth Ambassador and of Kerry GAA, while James McCarthy of AIB F&L and Dublin GAA also gave encouragement to the students on the day.
“We aimed to create a fun environment for kids to learn and develop under the mentorship of AIB’s fantastic volunteer base,” explains Stephen McGurn, AIB’s liaison partner for Junior Achievement Ireland. “Overall, the morning was a resounding success and we look forward to more events and programmes in the future for the 2016-2017 academic year.“
AIB has been a long standing supporter of JAI and we celebrated 20 years of collaboration this year. Every year around 50 to 60 staff across all areas of AIB visit schools throughout the country delivering programmes designed by JAI.
Interview skills was top of the list for another AIB/JAI event when AIB hosted an Employability Skills Workshop for Marion College, a secondary school just behind AIB Bankcentre. This programme developed the techniques for those all-important future job interviews for a group of 25 students.