What does it take to land a job and be successful in a knowledge-intensive company? What about for a kid from a disadvantaged neighborhood and a broken home who got through technical high school on a scholarship? If you can’t back up to early childhood development stimulation, what can you do at the later stages of adolescence to give these individuals a fighting chance to be a better version of themselves?
To enhance the options in Latin America, the MIF is piloting a project in Costa Rica that deals with a suite of interventions, including scholarships for technical training, intensive English language, and a major focus on “soft skills”—those life skills that can be missing when the household and neighborhood are less than nurturing and welcoming. The Fundación Monge, with 10 years of experience in interventions with scholarships, has honed in on technical education and jobs in the knowledge economy, to pull potential leaders from unlikely circumstances and provide them with the skills, mentoring, and improved network of contacts to get a good paying technical job and to be role models for others in their communities.
What is different here is that the social and emotional learning for better job insertion and resilience will use Virtual Reality to build upon the journey of personal discovery. A Hackathon for the co-creation process for ensuring useful content will engage with youth, psychologists, human resources and technical department heads from large companies, and creatives to work on the behaviors that hold the kids back or cause them to quit without trying harder once they are hired.
Studies, such as the recent Boston Consulting Group work for the World Economic Forum New Vision for Education, Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology, show that there are successful interventions for socioemotional learning combined with EdTech, though greater action is needed by governments, educators, parents, tech innovators, and employers in the private sector. There just isn’t a lot of content yet, and there is a chicken-and-egg paradigm for where to start, though the field is starting to grow in the USA with a few forward-thinking school systems that stimulate tech companies to create products along these lines. In Costa Rica, the Ministry of Education is on board and very interested in seeing how EdTech can be effectively incorporated into preparing for entry into the workforce.
MIF also has partnered with Santo Domingo Cyberpark in the Dominican Republic, to enhance the effectiveness of its collaboration agreement with the firm EON Reality, a global leader in the transfer of knowledge and the development of interactive digital technologies. The project will prepare the Dominican workforce in interactive digital technologies (augmented virtual reality) and enhance the country’s role in the global high-tech market by developing interactive business and/or learning solutions for public and private institutions. The business agreement envisages, among other things, making the Dominican Republic the leading global hub for developing, producing, and exporting sports solutions on virtual platforms, primarily linked to the baseball industry, where the Dominican Republic already stands out for its involvement in Major League baseball in the United States.