The Global Business Education Initiative becomes the Global Business Education Institute

The idea of the Global Business Education Initiative was developed towards the end of 2019 when James W. Phillips of JWP Media Group and Michael B. Levy of La Salle Institute realized that Business Education, in its present format, wasn’t doing enough to prepare young people for the real world.  Many schools were eliminating business education programs due to funding or weren’t even offering programs, yet every industry has a business component to it.  This was perplexing do us as to how schools could eliminate something from their student’s education that will be so important to them as contributing members to society.

With that in mind, we came up with the Global Business Education Initiative which was to provide students with real world exposure to help prepare them for their future endeavors. In March of 2020 we held our first event which was coordinated with the Business Program at La Salle Institute in Troy, NY.  Business leaders from around the world and the United States came to La Salle Institute for a day long symposium in front of all the business students at La Salle. This took place on March 9, 2020, and was to be our first program of many to come.  Unfortunately, the world shut down 4 days later due to the COVID pandemic.

During this time, James and I continued to talk and plan to bring back the GBEI. At the same time the business program continued to develop its academic program as well as provide students with real world exposure.  Prior to Covid the business program at La Salle worked on real world projects for companies around the world.  At the time of the shutdown, the students at La Salle had worked with around 60 companies in 13 countries, from branding to marketing plan development.  After COVID, many of those opportunities disappeared.

This is where the business program was able to adjust and implement a business simulation that would provide students with the same kind of real-world exposure but all within the confines of the program.  While we continued to seek new clients for the program, our students worked on the simulation as well as many projects directly for the business program, which included fundraising and the reopening of Café Cadets (a student-run café).

In the meantime, the GBEI was transforming from an initiative to an institute. James and I have developed a complete program that can be offered to secondary students and schools, university students and schools, and professionals within specific industries.  The Institute has 9 different programs under its umbrella, which are: School Cafes, a Business Podcast, Webinars, TED Talks, Workshops and Seminars, Business Boot Camps, Business Education Curriculum Development, Contract Teaching/Tutoring, and Young Entrepreneurs (a website dedicated to youth-run business startups that allow for more exposure for student-developed businesses).  We recently launched our website: www.thegbei.com which I hope you will look at. 

The launching of this organization goes along with our commitment to change how business is looked at academically and how we can change student preparation for the future.