Future CEO's

Recently Ballarat High School was invited to participate in the Mindshop Excellence Program. Mindshop is a structured work experience program which involves a small team of students being placed into a host organisation for one week. Acting as company ‘executives’ for the week, our students were hosted by local property development company Integra. The group was given a real issue to solve before presenting their findings and recommendations to the Integra management team.

Our team of students were Haylee Bayne, Lily Brown, Kaitlyn Cullinan, Connor Madigan, Jacob Osenaris and Mikayla Rigg.  We asked the group to provide some reflections on the program, any challenges they encountered and new skills learned as a result: 

Integra provided us with a very broad goal to achieve, to masterplan an estate. It was extremely daunting at first but we soon realised that we had a vast network of skilled individuals to help us every step of the way. We had conferences with the marketing and sales teams among many others. Throughout our time with the program we had access to a wide variety of tools and strategies provided to us by the Mindshop Excellence team at our training induction day. The strategies and tools we learnt were not only useful for the program but have real world implications that can be seen among many large corporations including Integra. 

During the week we encountered a few problems especially in communication but we were all very understanding and respectful of each other and adapted to each others' ideas and suggestions. At the end of the day, we were all there for the same reason and had the same goal.

The best things I took away from the program were the tools and strategies they taught us on the first day. They were all very useful and could definitely be made use of in real life situations.

The program allowed us to experience business case studies in real life. Being fully immersed in the issue rather than reading it out of a textbook is a foreign idea for students. Anyone can put pen to paper and write a couple of sentences and claim they have a solution but it requires certain skills to action a solution in real life. The program helped us learn that corporate issues aren’t as two dimensional as we thought. 

On the final day students presented their findings to the management team of Integra. Later in the day they delivered their summary at a presentation ceremony at Federation University attended by family, friends, school staff and host employers.  

Our sincere thanks go to Chris and Julie Mason the Mindshop Excellence Program founders, Commerce Ballarat for facilitating the program, Integra Ballarat for hosting our students and to the Mindshop mentor, Ewan Fletcher from Sharp Accounting.   

Andrew Wallace

MIP's