Skills for success in life, work and society
Courses
Participants
Key features
Locations
Our leadership courses
Since 2010, our international leadership programme has given hundreds of young people the insights and skills they need to build meaningful, productive and fulfilling careers. Whether you have already chosen your future path, or are still searching for the right direction, this course develops a broad set of essential competences which will remain relevant in all walks of life. The course is not just for people who see themselves as “leaders”. It is about things that everyone needs: self-confidence, intercultural learning, shared experience and growing your social capital. It may lead to quite profound changes in the way you see yourself and others.
This is not an academic or theoretical programme. The course is based on non-formal learning principles: it involves a wide variety of activities including discussions, problem-solving exercises, personality profiling, coaching skills practice, team challenges, creative media work, visits and meetings with inspirational people, and a full social programme. Participants work together in mixed nationality groups, thereby increasing their exposure to different life experiences and new ways of thinking.
What is different about this course
Our participants don’t just sit in a classroom and listen to lectures. Leadership skills are practical skills, built through interaction, teamwork, and understanding of difference. Time spent together socially is just as important as structured activities. Learning from and with each other is as valuable as inspiration from course leaders and guest speakers. The intercultural context promotes appreciation of diversity and creates perspectives that would simply be impossible back home. Cultural creativity matters as much as logic or academic ability. Young people expect to have fun, and they do.
Participants stay close and form lasting friendships through this intensive, fully residential programme. The resulting international networks will give you social capital that is second to none. The stories that you tell afterwards are the key to your next job application.
Listen to Meral’s poem, written as part of a creative challenge on our 2022 course
Participants
The diversity of our participants is what gives this programme its greatest strength. The course attracts not only university students, recent graduates and job starters, but also many young people who have not chosen an academic route after sixth form / highschool, including young people from less privileged backgrounds. No formal qualifications are required. Most participants are between 20 and 25 years of age. The 2022 course brought together our most diverse group yet, from countries across Europe, the southern Caucasus, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Course locations and future programmes
CILL’s international leadership programmes are organised in London or other historic and inspiring cities. The location partly depends on the theme of the course: for example, we are currently developing a new version focusing on leadership in complex situations, to take place in Cyprus.
We welcome suggestions and enquiries from any institution which would like to work with us to design new variants of this programme in their own location.
To find out more, or to enquire about our next available programme, please get in touch.
Meral, UK
Elene, Georgia
Jameson, UK