129 undergraduates to showcase skills at P&G students’ CEO Challenge

One hundred and twenty-nine teams shortlisted from various universities and business schools across Nigeria will have a chance to test their innovative and entrepreneurial skills in the first stage of the P&G CEO Challenge Competition.

This challenge is Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) first online case study challenge to be held in Nigeria.

Ridwan Sorunke, corporate communications official, P&G Nigeria, revealed that the competition was part of P&G’s commitment to touching and improving lives through talent development, as the competitors will get hands-on experience and coaching from Senior Business leaders on how to solve real business challenges.

According to him, “Talent development is top business priority for us at P&G because our people are our greatest competitive advantage. This makes us aim at attracting, hiring and retaining the very best talent. Our investment in growing and developing talent over time has made us known and recognised as the #1 Company for Developing Leaders.”

He said that the P&G CEO Challenge is a virtual competition for university students across the globe that is aimed at identifying, developing and grooming business leaders of tomorrow. The competition requires interested participants to form a three-man team from the same university who will together attempt to resolve the case studies that will be thrown to the competitors in the course of the challenge.

“The competition will be in five stages and stage one has been kicking off today with the 129 teams that have been short listed. We have designed a case study-based challenge to give them the opportunity to experience working on world class brands and developing their business acumen via face to face interactions with top P&G leaders at the stage 3 of the competition, deliberating on solutions to business cases,” he said.

Sorunke noted that following the call for entries into the competition, registered Teams participated in a photo contest on Facebook and winners shortlisted to commence the case study rounds of the competition.

Talking on the modalities for the competition, Sorunke said that the first elimination round is the Brand Manager Challenge in which 20 teams will be promoted to the second stage, which is called the Country Manager Challenge. Five teams are expected to emerge at the second phase level and move to the third phase which is the CFO Challenge.

From the CFO Challenge, a team will be promoted to the COO Challenge, competing against a team from South Africa and North West Africa region to determine who will represent the region at the last phase, the CEO Challenge, where they will face their global counterparts. This phase will be taking place in Dubai. The winner of the CEO Challenge will emerge the overall champion of the competition.

The winning team will be sponsored on an all-expense-paid International trip. There will also be consolation prizes, including iPads, for grabs by the competitors.

KELECHI EWUZIE