CEO of El Sewedy Education, Ihab Salama, was Nile FM's guest on "The Big Breakfast Show" with Rob &amp; Nadine, and he discussed the success of The Knowledge Hub, as well as Nova Universities and their focus on the entrepreneurial aspect.
If you missed Ihab Salama's interview on "The Big Breakfast Show", you can check out a full recap of the interview here:
Tell us about your background and journey to become the CEO of El Sewedy Education and The Knowledge Hub universities, and being the vice chair of the board of trustees.
&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a long journey, I&rsquo;ll try to sum it up as much as I can, [I've] been around 20 years in the field of investment and finance, this is basically my background, I was working looking after the investments of a big conglomerate family business company in Egypt, and I always asked myself what&rsquo;s my legacy? What am I leaving behind? And I found my passion in education.
I had this passion, I invested time in it, I started learning more and more. I&rsquo;ve been in the career of setting up new universities and transforming universities to do better for the past ten years or more, and I feel the impact [on] the youth and the young generation, and it&rsquo;s something that we really need to focus on, especially in our country.&rdquo;
In recent years, The Knowledge Hub experienced outstanding success, what do you think are the main elements that made this success possible?
&ldquo;I believe it&rsquo;s the teamwork. We have a great team, and everyone invested a lot into it. The success really behind it is the people who believe in the project, the vision that we all put together, and sticking to this vision and mission.
Basically, we are offering a different type of education, we&rsquo;re focusing on quality education, we&rsquo;re focusing on training the students, developing the students' skills, and preparing them for the job market.
We&rsquo;re not a typical type of university, the knowledge hub works under the IBC law, which is the international branch campus, so it&rsquo;s a different story, and it&rsquo;s something that Egypt needed, I believe this is one of the main pillars, and again it goes back to the quality of what we are delivering to our students, and this year we are graduating our first cohort, and we can really see the impact we&rsquo;re making. I believe this is one of the pillars of our success&rdquo;.
Tell us more about Nova University.
&ldquo;Nova University is an amazing university, it&rsquo;s a Portuguese university, it&rsquo;s a part of the EU. Basically, it&rsquo;s one of the top-ranked 300 universities worldwide in the QS ranking, it&rsquo;s one of the top 10 young European universities.
Nova has now around 20 thousand students, so many graduates, and the employability rate is up to 97%, it&rsquo;s an EU-accredited degree, so whoever graduates from Nova University can work in the EU.
So the beauty of our model is that whoever graduates from Nova University gets the exact same degree, with the exact same accreditation, so they&rsquo;re eligible to apply for jobs in the EU and so on, they get the same degree as if they graduated from the mother university, and then they get the equivalency here in Egypt from the supreme council of higher education.
Nova is very focused on entrepreneurship, and it ranked number one in innovation in Europe now according to the Financial Times, it&rsquo;s one of the top 25 universities and business schools.
We have the management school which is really focused on developing the students and their skills, and how to use the data to develop the companies, and better predict any risk, how [to] scale-up companies and turn around companies.
We have an offering of very innovative programs at Nova University in Egypt. They started environmental engineering 45 years ago, so they were thinking about the environment way before anyone else, and it was their first launched undergraduate program, this program addresses all the challenges that we are facing right now, climate change, sustainability, recycling, and all that. It&rsquo;s all about the environment from an engineering perspective, and in every program they add the management component.
What guidance would you offer aspiring students of business and budding entrepreneurs?
Nova University as I mentioned briefly, they focus very much on the entrepreneurial side, so basically what they do is, they put a bunch of skillset within their curriculum, that can really advance the skills of the student and make them ready for the job market.
It&rsquo;s about graduating global citizens, students that are ready to work in any company, in any part of the world, and interact with people from any part of the world, because of globalization, there are no boundaries or no borders, when it comes to business and dealing with corporations and so on.
The job market is really changing, before COVID we were discussing in the education sector that we can&rsquo;t predict the job market, imagine after COVID with all the fast forward that is happening to the technology, and the changes that we are all witnessing right now.
That&rsquo;s the strength of Nova, they teach the student how to learn, to adapt, to change, and be ready to move from one career to another because things will change, some jobs will disappear, some jobs will stay, and some jobs will come up.
What are the future plans and visions for Nova University?
Part of having Nova in The Knowledge Hub was that we were very aligned in terms of the vision and the mission.
The vision is really to cope with the changes that are taking place, so the idea is to bridge the gap between industry, academia, and society. We have very strong links with the industrial side, we understand what type of skills they&rsquo;re looking [for], and what are the gaps in the market.
That&rsquo;s what Nova is really good at, and this is why [it] became very entrepreneurial and innovative in what it offers, and it&rsquo;s adapting and always staying close to society and understanding what society needs, what the economy requires, so it&rsquo;s not only about graduating students, we take into consideration the future jobs.
How exactly does Nova University&rsquo;s program support students beyond their academic careers?
We have a very strong career office, which prepares students from day one by providing internships, and training in different companies.
Nova is also a part of a utopia consortium, it&rsquo;s a huge European consortium that also gathers most of the top-ranked universities in Europe, and the students have the opportunity not only to stay in Nova, but they have the opportunity to stay for a semester in these universities that Nova is partners with.

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