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…