Global Career Company partner ESSEC preparing students to take the lead in emerging markets
From Cassandra Pittman, Global Talent Acquisition Director, at the ESSEC conference in Paris this week
It is 17:14. The event closes in 16 minutes, but you wouldn’t know it from the buzz in the room. My colleague, Celia Injai and I are sharing the room with the likes of Carrefour, Total, Axa, Johnson & Jonson, Michelin, Capgemini Consulting and more than 100 other top European and multinational firms, all here to attract top talent from one of Europe’s premier institutions for business education, ESSEC.
ESSEC has a reputation for developing many of France’s most prominent business leaders. Alumni of the Grand Ecole include Michel Bon, CEO of France Telcom (1995 – 2002), Jean-Luc Decornoy, CEO of KMPG France, and Nicolas Hieronimus, President of L’Oreal Luxury, among many others. Less well known, perhaps, is the footprint ESSEC alumni have begun to make in the emerging markets.
ESSEC is one of the many world-class educational institutions in Global Career Company’s partner network, and, today, Celia and I have come here to meet some of the future business leaders of the emerging markets. People like, Heang Chhor, a 1984 alumnus of ESSEC who is now CEO of McKinsey Singapore, and Charles Konan Banny, who, after graduating from ESSEC, enjoyed a meteoric career at the Central Bank of West African States and eventually became the Prime Minster of Côte d’Ivoire.
It has been a busy day. Between the two of us, Celia and I have spoken with hundreds of bright young minds, hungry for a chance to make their mark in Africa or Asia, and to be a part of the growth in those regions which outpaces that in France by more than two to one. When we tell them that 68% of global economic growth over the next decade is predicted to come from the emerging markets, and that collectively, Asia and Africa comprise more than two-thirds of the world’s fastest growing markets, some of them become wide eyed, but many of them nod their head in enthusiastic acknowledgement, as if to say ‘I know! That’s why I’m here!”
We will see many of these faces again,
at one of our upcoming recruitment Summits in London and Paris. And as we flip through the pile of CVs the students have left, we can’t help but wonder how many of these names we might see again in business headlines next to the titles like CEO, Chairman, and, yes, maybe even, Prime Minister.