Junior Enterprises in Portugal — A story with people inside
I started drafting these ideas 3 weeks ago after getting in touch with all the Portuguese Junior Enterprises on our Annual National Meeting and even presented them on my local Toastmasters Club but kind of forgot it since then.
A junior enterprise (JE) works like a normal enterprise but is entirely managed by students. Learn by doing is the main motto.
This week I received an email from Alex (Vice-President of JADE — the European Confederation of JE) asking for some help to create a magazine about junior entrepreneurs success stories from all over the world and thought it could be nice to finish this and publish it.
For the last 3 years I have been hacking education on a tech-based junior enterprise from Coimbra with other engineering and design students, jeKnowledge.
Compared to 2012, when I started getting involved, I can see there are a lot more JEs I can truly see myself trusting a service I needed if I didn't know anything about all this movement because of the great portfolio they already have.
Actually, although JUNITEC is now celebrating its 25 years old, and is the oldest portguese JE, most of them don’t have much more than 5 years old.
Thus, it was during the last 2–3 years most of them started being run by people that were not their founders making sure JEs will be here in Portugal for a long time.
Nowadays you can already find JEs in Lisbon (4), Coimbra (3), Porto (3), Braga, Aveiro and Vila Real. Besides these ones there are another 20 junior enterprises spread by Portugal not yet certified by JADE Portugal (JE portuguese federation) but keeping the track of the first 13.
The main focus of them all is to create talents by involving their members on internal projects and trainings first and than on projects with real clients.
The services offered go from business consultancy (finance, strategy, market studies or communication plans), technology (design, software and hardware), workshops or events support.
One of the big moments of our annual meeting is the jeniAL Awards, when the JEs present their work during the last year and it was the moment I felt the biggest difference when compared to 3 years ago.
From worldwide companies (Microsoft, L’Oréal, Santander, Sage and PwC), great SMEs (Critical Software, Wit Software) or awesome startups (Imaginary Cloud, JOBBOX, Lunacloud) this 18 to 23 years old guys were part of projects with them all during 2014.
Besides contributing to talent growth these organizations choose JEs mainly because they are looking for competitive prices (40–60%) or for a fresh way of solving problems. But the ones who keep being clients do it because they know JEs are a special students community. This community likes what they do and wants to learn the best way of doing it. That ends up delivering a great work!
I don’t have the data but if I had to guess I would say the average time for a student to be part of a JE is between 1.5 to 2 years. With such an high human resources dynamics it’s a true challenge to manage it while continue pushing it forward one more step.
That is only possible with great people and it is about them that I will talk on the take #2 of this post.
Send me a name: Who is the person that was part of your JE and you find most inspiring for what he already achieved?
