11 Apr 2018 – 10:43

INJAZ Qatar announces ‘Job Champions Competition’ winners

From second left: Frederic Sallet, Thales CEO; Eric Chevallier, French Ambassador to Qatar; Sheikha Hanadi bint Nasser Al Thani, INJAZ Chairperson; Abdulla Abdulaziz Al Subaie, Qatar Rail CEO and Emad El Khaja, INJAZ CEO, with the contestants during the awarding ceremony of the Job Champions Competition held at Four Seasons Hotel, yesterday. Pic: Baher Amin / The Peninsula

By Amna Pervaiz Rao / The Peninsula

DOHA: INJAZ Qatar announced the first “Job Champions Competition” winners in Qatar and certified all the participants, recently in the presence of INJAZ Qatar Board members, the French embassy officials, organizers, partners and volunteers who were involved in the competition.

The Job Champions Competition was organised by INJAZ Qatar in partnership with the French Embassy and Thales; a French company that has had business ties with Qatar for over three decades. The competition was open to all university students currently studying one of the business or engineering majors such as Marketing, Accounting, Finance, HR, Engineering and IT.

Through a multi-module programme that ended in a challenging competition last week, hand-picked students were taught a range of skills crucial for job-readiness in both the private and public sectors. The competition required each team of students to come up with a solution to a real-life challenge related to Thales’s business.

qatar airways

Six teams of four students each, took part in the programme.   Team ‘Illimitables’, consisting of El Tayeb Mohammed (from Qatar University), Reem Khalid Al Mahmoud (Qatar University), Omar Hicham Khodr (Texas A & M) and Aseel Wazwaz (Qatar University) won the competition with their innovation – a SMART PORT.

The SMART PORT aims to decrease the stress on Hamad Port’s container operations. The students created a command system that would control the arrival and placements of containers, according to each ship’s arrival, in an efficient and timely manner, thereby managing the storage space at the port. With the port ready to invest more funds for expansions next year, the low-cost SMART PORT proposed solution would potentially result in considerable savings.

The four-member winning team will progress to module 4 of the program; which is an all-expenses paid, three-week internship with Thales in France in July 2018. The winners, thrilled at winning the grand prize, observed how Job Champions surpassed all their expectations.

Omar Hicham Khodr, a sophomore Mechanical Engineering student at Texas A & M University in Doha, and one of the winners, said, “My expectation was that there would be short training sessions and a simple competition at the end. But it was far more than that – it even taught us how to shape your character and personality, to aim to become a CEO of a company.”

Speaking at the ceremony, Sheikha Hanadi bint Nasser Al Thani, Chairperson of INJAZ Qatar said, “In the current job environment, soft skills are just as important as earning an academic qualification.

“In fact, as the world becomes more connected, the need for interpersonal skills, behavioral adaptability and a positive attitude have become so crucial, that top businesses across the globe consider such training on par with receiving a university degree. That is why initiatives such as Job Champions Competition are both necessary and effective.”

Emad Al Khaja, CEO of INJAZ Qatar, too spoke at the ceremony. “It’s a very proud moment for Injaz Qatar. We have all worked on the Job Champions Competition for quite a while. A lot of effort and thought has gone into organizing the programme. Though this was the first edition of Job Champions, Injaz Qatar has been working on providing career development programmes for Qatar’s youth for the past ten years.”

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