Nestlé hosts K-12 work immersion program
Nestlé Philippines, in partnership with the Department of Education (DepEd), has made a commitment to help prepare young people for the workplace through an 80hour K-12 Work Immersion Program called “Nesting Your Future at Nestlé.”
The new program is part of a global initiative called Nestle Needs Youth, in which Nestlé exposes students, NESTers as they are called, to the end-toend value chain of the company to help prepare them for a professional working environment.
Spearheaded by Nestle’s Youth Initiative market lead,Gracy Dandan, Nesting Your Future at Nestlé is now being implemented across the various Nestlé sites in the Philippines. The Makati Administrative Office is engaging senior high school students from the Accountancy, Business and Management (ABM) strand, while the different factories are focusing on students from the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) strand.
Recently, the Makati Administrative Office held the graduation ceremony for its very first batch of NESTers, the top 20 ABM students of Pitogo High School. The event was attended by Nestlé Philippines chairman and CEO Jacques Reber, other members of the executive committee, Nestlé employees, DepEd Makati officials, parents, and teachers. The NESTers impressed their audience with the quality of their presentations as they shared their learnings and key takeaways from the two-week immersion program, their insights conveyed through videos, songs, paintings, spoken poetry and a shadow play.
Reber, who highlighted the talent and creativity of the students in his remarks, said, “This is the first time we’ve done this program. The idea has never been that after two weeks you will become experts in accounting, sales, marketing, or HR or supply chain. The idea is to share with you how we make choices in our lives, what you have to choose. Hearing what you said in your really brilliant presentations, I can feel that you have understood that you need to choose your lives, not your jobs, but the lives that you want to have.”
Director of human resources Mitzie Antonio said, “We thought of a program that would help prepare our youth for the challenges in the world of work, a program that would somehow inspire them to continue to add value for the growth of our country. But what happened was, in the journey of the last two weeks, we were the ones who actually got inspired by them. It gave us an opportunity to be reminded why we do the things we do at Nestlé. We are a company with the purpose of enhancing the quality of life and contributing to a healthier future….”