EY: 4th Women Fit for Business program successfully completed

AIPFE Cyprus-Women of Europe in collaboration with EY Cyprus and CIM-Cyprus Business School have successfully completed the 4th round of the highly successful initiative Women Fit for Business (WF4B) Cyprus. To mark the program’s successful completion, a graduation ceremony took place on 24 May.

The 30-hour program, which was initiated by AIPFE in 2015, was carried out between February to May 2023 in an effort to empower, motivate and connect unemployed and under-employed female university graduates. The program entailed training and mentoring with essential hard and soft skills and covered a range of topics, including interview techniques, agile ways of working, digital marketing and the art of decision making.

This year’s cohort of graduates consisted of 11 ambitious ladies, whose interests varied from psychology to interior design, linguistics to digital design and economics to law a testament of this generation’s core interests.

Speaking on behalf of CIM-Cyprus Business School, Yangos Hadjiyannis, CEO noted that “We at CIM-Cyprus Business School are delighted to celebrate the successful completion of the WF4B program, which we have joined as partners with AIPFE and EY Cyprus for a second time. At the CIM-Cyprus Business School we are nurturing Business Leaders for the past 45 years, so this project provided an excellent opportunity to us to transfer knowledge and inspire young women for a successful career, fully aligned with our Social Responsibility Strategy. We are overjoyed to congratulate all participants and to wish them the greatest success, to continue growth, learning and to keep finding paths which help them reach their goals”.

On behalf of AIPFE, Myria Avraamidou, WF4B project manager, imparted words of wisdom to the graduating class. ‘Be Ambitious but be humble and compassionate; Take credit for your success and don’t blame others for failure; Be intellectually rigorous, identify your biases, your prejudices, your privileges; Define yourself by what you love, be demonstrative and generous in your praise of those you admire; Respect people with less power than you; Confidence is nothing more than the ability, to trust yourself.

In her welcome address, Myria Saparilla, Partner, Tax Services at EY Cyprus noted: “At EY we have defined our purpose as helping build a better working world and, through our EY Ripples program, we support young people to develop new skills to find meaningful work. In this context, we are proud to have supported, once again, AIPFE’s WF4B program aimed at empowering young women in Cyprus. Hopefully, we can give these women the opportunity to make a new beginning in a new career endeavour of their choice.”

Finally, the spotlight turned onto the WF4B graduates, who received their certificates with immense pride and joy. Two prizes were awarded by CIM and EY- an MBA scholarship at the CIM worth €7800 and a six-month internship at EY.