Volunteer Day! (Laurie Miller)

We in Morocco on the team helping the OFPPT, the government organization that provides vocational training to Morocco's youth, were lucky enough to have our entire CSC team come to the OFPPT for Volunteer Day this week.

The team of 15 IBMers spent the morning with about 150 young Moroccans in the schools of IT, and Business and Management. These young people were all studying to be business owners, managers, developers, architects, graphic arts designers, etc. We had the opportunity to help them understand what it's like to work for IBM, how to interview, and how to turn their knowledge into strengths, both on paper in their CVs and in person in their interviews.

Our sponsors, coordinators, and partners in this endeavor were Nadia from Education for Employment or EFE, an organization that helps ready graduates for interviews and helps place them in jobs, and our dear Imane from Digital Opportunity Trust or DOT, the group that has arranged our entire stay here in Morocco. They and Nabil, our counterpart from IBM, kicked off the session, explaining their groups and why IBM was here for the month, and then we introduced ourselves.

After that we broke into three groups -

• IT technical folks
• People interested in Business and Management
• People interested in Digital Economy

In our small groups, we all endeavored to get the students talking. We wanted them to understand what it's like to speak up, to express oneself in front of others they don't know, and to do some sort of exercise to help them start thinking about their futures. The Business and Management group had them do some role playing exercises where they were a manager and a worker having difficult conversations, the IT group shared information about how no matter what skills (languages, etc.) one learns in school, that everything is useful in the marketplace. Many of them will be working in areas in  the future that don't even exist today, and they need to know that what they learn is transferable. In our Digital Economy group, we talked about the things they do online today, and how those hobbies and fun things are skills they can use in their careers, and how to translate those into strengths on their CVs.

At the end of our time, we got back together in a large group and students who wanted to addressed the whole group about what they learned. We believe that for the most part, they loved it. The best quote is from one young man who said "When I heard about this group coming to OFPPT, I thought it was going to be really annoying. But it was wonderful - thank you so much." The video below is Sue encouraging students to get up and talk about their experience, and one young brave women being the first of many to do so.

#ibmcsc #ibmcscmorocco5