Future business brains

ESPC is delighted to support a local initiative where members of our team go into schools to run sessions for high school pupils on the core skills they will need in the workplace (such as communication, problem solving or teamwork) or provide an insight into certain areas of business such as marketing, finance, product development or risk management. Over the course of a day, the pupils will hear from 3 or 4 business people from a variety of backgrounds.

In recent years we have sent staff to Portobello High School, Trinity Academy, Craigmount High School, George Watson School and St George’s.

Our most recent session was at Loretto School (in Musselburgh) and involved encouraging the pupils to work in teams. It was a really enjoyable session and based on feedback it sounds like the pupils got a lot out of it as well.

The session was split into 3 sections.

Warm-Up

To get their minds thinking creatively we posed 10 brain teasers for the pupils, including:

• In Edinburgh, you cannot to take a picture of a man with a wooden leg. Why not?
• Prior to the discovery of Mount Everest, what was the highest mountain in the world?
• Johnny’s mother had three children. The first child was named April. The second child was named May. What was the third child’s name?

The answers are obvious as long as you read the question 'properly'.

You can see the full list and answers on forbes.com

Property Hunt

Each team is given a copy of The ESPC Paper. Through asking a series of questions which can be answered yes or no, they have to identify the one property which has been selected by the session leader. The group that won this task only required 11 questions to find one property out of around 4,000 included in the Paper.

Paper Tower

The main task involves working in teams to build the tallest free standing tower using only one role of sellotape and one copy of The ESPC Paper. Like any business, they have finite resources to achieve their objective. Below is a selection of the towers created by the pupils. The first 2 images are of the top and bottom of the tallest tower built that day. It was too tall to fit in one photograph.