TGS: the global network for young leaders

Being a young, dynamic, and visionary group, we find it crucial to give young people a prominent place in our network. We also support ongoing education which we believe can only bring a positive outcome for businesses. Moreover, caring about young leaders allows us to work on our sustainable development goals. 

Why is SDG4 important?

As you probably already know, TGS places sustainability centre stage. It has thus been more than three years that we have been working on implementing the sustainable development goals of the United Nations Global Compact through all kinds of actions, projects, and campaigns. One of the aims we actively pursue (and which is especially close to our hearts) is the fourth sustainable development goal.

SDG4 aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and to promote lifelong learning opportunities”. Education is indeed essential to reach other sustainable goals like empowering women, fighting inequalities, poverty, and climate change. Or in other words: without education, no real change is possible.

Therefore, the United Nations Global Compact recommends integrating sustainable development into education at all levels (that is what we do by offering TGS University webinars to our members for instance) but implementing such a goal goes much further.

Great internship opportunities

At TGS Global, we have always taken on trainees. But with Covid-19, education problems have been aggravated everywhere in the world, that’s a fact: schools have closed, online classes are the norm but not all can follow them and lesser-known issue is the difficulty for students to find an internship in these strange times. Witnessing some despondency from a lot of students who desperately need an internship to validate their diploma, we decided to take on more interns than we normally do, and to organize our work accordingly.

An internship position at TGS is a great opportunity for future leaders. They acquire plenty of new skills thanks to the large variety of tasks they undertake. From prospection to social media campaigns by way of organizing webinars they are entrusted with truly important missions and contribute to exciting major international projects like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in Asia-Pacific, to cite a recent example.

The TGS Young Leader Program

Why such a program?

If we are honest, it is often the managing partners who participate in the working groups of the network, and sometimes they do not have much time to invest in research projects or other TGS initiatives. We also realised that many members would like to be more involved in the network, which we can only encourage. As we like to say: the more you put in, the more you get out 😉 and isn’t the aim of being in a network to participate, to share knowledge and to make connections?

The benefits for your company

So, we thought it would be a great idea to develop a program for our partners of the future. By joining this program, you actively generate more business referrals for your firm, and you give your young leaders numerous opportunities. As a matter of fact, our program allows them to manage a project, to join other TGS groups (like our TGS tax, audit, or legal committees, for instance), and they can enjoy really valuable professional coaching sessions.

Who is this program designed for? 

Let’s be clear, young leaders do not need to be “young” in the literal sense of the word. A young leader can be someone new in the profession, from 18 to 81 years old! Basically, it can be anyone showing initiative and potential, or a person showing interest in the network: a business development manager, a potential future partner, a staff member, … Everyone is welcome to participate, really.

How does it work?

The managing partners of our member firms nominate “young leaders” to participate. The program runs for three months with three different groups: one for Asia Pacific, one for Europe Middle East and Africa, and one for The Americas. The training sessions take place once a month and cover different topics like “Identifying ideal prospective Clients”, “Creating and Managing a Sales Pipeline”, and “Benefiting from Networking Situations”.