One
of the great things about working in a global company is being able to see
things that have worked really well in other countries, and take inspiration
and advice from the people who made them happen to create something just as
successful. For me, our STEM initiative is a great example of this…
In
July 2015, we launched our STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics) Ambassador Programme, designed to inspire and encourage young
people to join our industry. Our Ambassadors, who are employees from around the
business, support teachers at local secondary schools in running interactive
workshops, talking about their experiences, and teaching them technical skills
learnt and used in a work place. We also host our very own CDK STEM events,
CODESMART, and invite young people from local schools to join us for a day of
User Interface (UI) Design, HTML coding and demos.
This
originally piloted in our UK office, but after hearing about the success of the
event we were keen to do something similar here in Spain. So, we got in touch with
the UK Team who gave us advice on how we could make the event the best it could
be. We formed a team of 10 Ambassadors and the level of energy and enthusiasm
from them was absolutely incredible - they had so many fantastic ideas.
A
few months of planning later, we opened our doors and welcomed 8 students into
our office (and the lovely thing was, one of them was an employee’s son!). Over three consecutive mornings, our team of STEM
Ambassadors spoke about CDK Global, explained the Agile Methodology and played
Agile games with a group of eight 16-year old Science students from a local
school. The group also had an opportunity to try out their web development
skills and in fact some of the students came away saying they had a new
vocation – to be Developers!
We couldn’t have done this without the guidance from our UK
colleagues, and are looking forward to many more CODESMART events!
Here are some photos of the fun…





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