AN­GE­LO JE­DIDI­AH

an­ge­lo.je­didi­ah@guardian.co.tt

Over 600 sec­ondary school stu­dents across the coun­try will be com­pet­ing against each oth­er in this year’s an­nu­al Na­tion­al Sec­ondary School En­tre­pre­neur­ship Com­pe­ti­tion (NSSEC).

The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion-en­dorsed com­pe­ti­tion al­lows stu­dents to build their own busi­ness­es vir­tu­al­ly in or­der to com­pete against one an­oth­er, sim­u­lat­ing a re­al-world en­vi­ron­ment.

En­tre­pre­neur­ship con­tin­ues to grow across the coun­try, as na­tion­als, es­pe­cial­ly youths, con­tin­ue to find ways to sur­vive through the dif­fi­cul­ties of the econ­o­my. The NSEEC pro­vides a plat­form for stu­dents to learn and de­vel­op their en­tre­pre­neur­ial think­ing in an en­gag­ing way.

On Wednes­day, stu­dents from var­i­ous sec­ondary schools at­tend­ed the NSSEC open­ing cer­e­mo­ny at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts, Port-of-Spain.

Sophia Stone, 3-Stone di­rec­tor, who works close­ly with NSSEC, said the en­tre­pre­neur­ship train­ing com­pe­ti­tion is the biggest in the Caribbean re­gion, not on­ly due to its large num­ber of an­nu­al par­tic­i­pants but be­cause of the lev­el of suc­cess achieved by their young trainees.

“There’s about 128, teams of groups of five stu­dents, they come to­geth­er and they work like a re­al busi­ness, they have a CEO. They have a fi­nan­cial con­troller and HR man­ag­er, mar­ket­ing, they come to­geth­er, and they make strate­gic de­ci­sions about build­ing their busi­ness, where to set their man­u­fac­tur­ing plant, how much to do in sales, how much to pro­duce things that peo­ple who are ac­tu­al­ly in busi­ness have to deal with,” Stone ex­plained.

Ac­cord­ing to the NSSEC, the prizes for this year’s com­pe­ti­tion will in­clude over $100,000 worth of tech­no­log­i­cal de­vices such as Ap­ple lap­tops, iPads and Sam­sung phones, as they con­tin­ue to pro­mote dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion in the world of busi­ness and en­tre­pre­neur­ship.

“The stu­dents have re­al­ly em­braced this pro­gramme they per­form amongst the best in the world. This sim­u­la­tion teach­es them how to make de­ci­sions. And we have seen some in­cred­i­ble en­tre­pre­neurs come out of this pro­gramme,” Stone said.

With over 30,000 hours of train­ing al­ready de­liv­ered to stu­dents, NSSEC is hop­ing that they will con­tin­ue to im­prove the pos­si­bil­i­ties for stu­dents as they en­ter the fu­ture and world of busi­ness own­er­ship.