Training the Educators and Upskilling the Youth is Imperative in the 'New Normal'
Over the past year, the pandemic has massively impacted educators and the youth are at the risk of unemployment due to the uncertain economy. The current situation has given us a perspective to step back and think of the evolving dynamics of digital skilling across industry sectors. To bridge the digital divide is a solution that requires organizations to work together to equip everyone for tomorrow’s digital world, Lenovo believes that upskilling the workforce be it the educators or the youth.
To remain relevant and effective, ICT & TechnoServe in partnership with Lenovo have adopted technology to resonate across all facets of education be it for online learning, e-program delivery, teacher training, or e-assessments. Here is how Lenovo partners play a pivotal role in education bringing solutions innovative and and products comprehensive to provide employability and work readiness skills, and robust placement support infrastructure. ICT Academy has been emerging with various initiatives to positively address the needs of the academia and the student community since the first COVID-19 lockdown levied across India, presenting an array of empowerment programs for the benefit of the teaching fraternity through the SKY CAMPUS® platform.
Today’s kids are highly exposed to technology, and the teachers who teach them belong to the generations of the past. Hence, teachers should get upskilled to ensure that the teaching-learning process happens seamlessly. Recently, ICT Academy partnered with Lenovo to train 1,000 govt. schoolteachers on digital teaching skills to help them achieve their teaching goals, motivate students to learn from isolation, promote teamwork in digital space and assess their knowledge with or without exams or assignments.
The idea is to reach rural India, at an affordable cost with the launch of the SKY CAMPUS® platform. The program will provide the best of the content, delivered by the best of the teachers for our educators to learn at their own pace. ICT Academy will help teachers change their teaching style to meet the demands of this new digital world and make the virtual classroom a great learning environment. Providing innovative solutions to the pressing problems of academia has been the blood and nerve of ICT Academy throughout its journey so far. We will continue to march ahead emerging successful in all our endeavors in serving academia and building the nation.
The TechnoServe Campus to Corporate Careers program works with students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We adapted our curriculum to suit online delivery, used digital mediums to reach out to colleges, students, and corporations alike, and equipped our staff with new-age digital tools. Our alumni, a majority of whom are women, became our program ambassadors and supported us in the mobilization of youth. As a result, during the pandemic, we have trained and upskilled more than 4000 youth, more than 70% of them being women.
Another key learning for us was the efficacy of our college-embedded model. In our partnership with Lenovo, we provide holistic skill training to 100 female students from marginalized communities studying from colleges in Mumbai. These students from non-technical streams will be trained in the IT/ITES and BFSI sectors to help them build their IT careers. Additionally, 150 students will be trained in technical job roles like manufacturing and electronics in Puducherry where Lenovo will provide on-the-job training to a select number of students enrolled in the program at Lenovo Puducherry manufacturing plant.
In the future, the C2C program aims to function in a blended format, keeping the best of both offline and online modes. Over the next five years, we are planning to reach out to 200,000 youth and move one million people out of poverty. Our C2C program has made that dream possible for students like Pampa. Here is what they said about our program: Pampa Manna, a 2018 student, notes, “I am blessed to have TechnoServe at a critical turning point in my life. You The inspired position me and I have changed today as my an thinking.
Accounts Executive at CMA CGM, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, is only because of your effective training!”