AIESEC is a platform that strives to unlock the potential within humankind. We do that by enabling young people to demonstrate and live by values based on AIESEC's leadership development model. We believe that challenging experiences with AIESEC and leading with values in mind paves the way for a positive impact.

OUR UNIQUE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT MODEL

AIESEC’s leadership development model seeks to prepare youth to take a stand on what they care about and embody the AIESEC values for long-lasting impact.

Our Inner & Outer Journey

We believe that young people learn best by doing and reflecting. The following diagram shows the framework AIESEC provides in every experience, enabling young people to learn the most from every experience. The outer journey is the individual’s interaction with the external environment. The Inner Journey is the internal change that happens within the individual. The combination of the two ensures that what someone learns from any experience will stay with them forever.

The elements in each are the following:

Impact Your journey’s impact on society. This enables young people to see their connection with the world and take ownership and responsibility for their actions and impact.

Individual responsibility Taking individual responsibility with clear goals is a first step in the outer journey of leadership development.

Challenging role and environment Your role and surrounding environment push you to leave your comfort zone, enabling you to learn.

Interaction with multiple stakeholders The diversity and quantity of stakeholders to which an individual is accountable heavily influences one’s leadership development. For example, interactions with diverse cultures or different types of stakeholders (boss-customer-colleague, AIESEC-company-NGO, etc.)

Reflect on your experience Going through self reflection exercises to understand how you are achieving personal goals, changing throughout the experience, and capture your learnings and realizations.

Support system In the outer journey there should be some support system for the inner journey. It can be a mentor, coach, buddy, etc. A support system can be provided by AIESEC or any other external stakeholder.

Set personal goals The inner leadership journey starts with understanding where you are currently and with se_ng goals for what you want to gain from the experience.

Understand your personal values By living the experience and going through inner journey you realize the fundamental things about yourself – your values and how they impact your everyday life.

Reinvent yourself Capturing the learning from this experience to use it in the future: Understanding your new self.

LEAD LEAD works as a catalyst in the form of spaces that we provide to our programs’ participants to facilitate their Inner Journey, and thus ensure they are developing the leadership qualities from our model. To do so, the LEAD Content and Learning Environments are used as tools for hosting, in accordance to the objectives and audience.