USAID continues to provide a platform for Professional Communities to meet and interact

The first was for the Strategic Management and the Trade and Export Marketing communities at the Century Park Hotel in Amman.

The second was for the Human Resources community at the Imperial Palace Hotel. Over eighty five professional community members attended the meetings.

PC members meet at regular intervals in a pledge to fortify personal relationships, raise discussions on emerging best practices, introduce best practice tools, and highlight local experiences and successes.

These two community-wide meetings presented members with the results of recent Executive Round Tables (ERT) covering various management topics such as strategic action planning and talent management.

PC members spoke of their ERT experiences and lessons learnt, and how they applied these lessons to improe their respective companies.. As community members briefed their peers on the ongoing ERTs, they also invited them to participate in different activities taking place.

To maintain interaction and exchange among community members, SABEQ announced the soft-launch of an interactive web portal www.jordanpc.com, that serves as an additional meeting place for collaboration, a consolidator of groups' collective intelligence, and a provider of international resources and expertise.

The web portal contains valuable resources and tools, both international and specific to Jordan, that benefit all community members. Such resources are vetted by an expert and include templates, presentations, articles, white papers, podcasts, RSS feeds, videos, case profiles, and others.

A calendar shows upcoming events in which any interested PC member can join, and polls provide members with an opportunity to provide feedback on various professional community topics.

In SABEQ's initiation of the PC web portal, it invited members to comment on resources and to rate them, thereby enabling fellow community members to increasingly learn from each other's insights.

Members will also upload and contribute resources of potential value to other members. Through such member-driven initiative PCs will become increasingly relevant to the specific challenges of doing business in Jordan, and will provide ever-increasing value to members.

The USAID Jordan Economic Development Program (SABEQ) is a five year broad economic development initiative implemented by Bearing Point, Inc. and a sizeable team of international and Jordanian partner firms. By both supporting improvements in the business environment and providing assistance to expand innovation and productivity in Jordanian businesses, it supports the main objective of building up the private sector as a powerful engine of economic growth.