Ubifrance: raising awareness of ICV

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Ubifrance is the French agency for international business development. It is a veritable hub for French SMEs and large groups in other countries, supporting over 15,000 businesses each year and thousands of young international corporate volunteers (ICV). Faced with global competition, the government agency sought to improve its services and commercial strategy.

For several years, France has burdened under a several foreign trade deficit, which dipped even further in 2007 down to almost 40 billion euros. What role does Ubifrance play against this difficult backdrop?

Christophe Lecourtier : There are obviously short-term reasons relating to the present low ebb in our foreign trade. With rising energy and gas prices, a strong euro, and the financial crisis in the United States, it is a difficult period for world trade. It is nevertheless a fact that our companies must be better equipped internationally. Ubifrance provides companies a global network of 2,000 specialists, tools, and services to facilitate setting up business abroad. We are a public service provider that promotes access to business at every step of a company's growth. More recently, we extended our service offer to SMEs. For managers of these companies, exporting can indeed appear complicated, yet it is a powerful development tool. We want to be the organisation that gives a leg up to companies casting their sights internationally.

What advantages does ICV present for recent graduates or companies in an economy where international development is becoming the standard?

Today, big companies are reviewing conditions for their expatriate workers. The time when French expatriate executives were "lords of war" revelling in enviable perks is long gone. For companies, ICV is a simple, economically viable solution with few legal hassles. For recent graduates, volunteering provides strong professional experience. In most cases, volunteers are entrusted with genuinely weighty jobs. In fact, our former ICV participants often say that their time volunteering helped accelerate their career.
It is a balanced contract with a trial period for both volunteer and company. ICV is mutually beneficial, the meeting of two opportunities. Finally for the company, ICV has clearly become a way to attract recruits in a tense job market. Most major French groups now look to ICV to help them hire their future international executives. But the same goes for SMEs: ICV helps them project an ambitious, innovative corporate image and thus attract profiles which might have slipped through their fingers otherwise.
 

International corporate volunteering is one of the backbones of Ubifrance. Since being set up in 2001, the ICV system has earned its laurels, and one year ago it celebrated the departure of the 5,000th volunteer. Now the government is asking you to speed up the pace.

Ubifrance is looking for recent graduates with a proven track record, good language training, and a personality suiting expatriate life and assuming responsibilities. It is a difficult mission, given the growing tensions of the labour market and the fact that Ubifrance is not a professional hiring agency. It is true that the government has established very ambitious goals for ICV, asking us to reach 10,000 active volunteers by 2011. This is a real challenge that requires breaking new ground by repositioning our strategy and giving it a new dimension. It quickly became crucial to seek the assistance of a partner.

What were the main areas affected by repositioning?

The work of the Quatre Vents consultants was both subtle and relevant. Far from questioning previously-laid groundwork, they helped change our strategy by convincing students of the value of ICV as early as possible. Until then, Ubifrance mainly "pursued" master's students who were near graduation. Quatre Vents' expertise led us to position ourselves more proactively, to plant the idea of international volunteering even earlier in the minds of students so that ICV would naturally become an option and requirement for them.
That is the goal of the site created by the Quatre Vents teams, www.partir-en-vie.com. It should spark the desire to volunteer abroad. Last May, an initial chat on the site attracted over 2,000 students, most of whom were hearing about international volunteering for the first time. Actions like this lead to further action, create buzz, and attract new audiences to ICV.