By Mae Kowalke
Equipping young people with the skills to succeed in the work world is important, but without self-confidence no skill set will help a person rise out of poverty or change the world with a breathtaking idea.
That’s one of the lessons that’s been so obvious to Estelle Day as she helps guide Alcatel-Lucent’s global signature program, ConnectEd, as its program director. ConnectEd helps participants, mainly young adults, enter the work world with the education and tools they need to succeed.
“It often strikes me that across all the different contexts that ConnectEd works in, and all the different types and backgrounds of youth, one of the most commonly cited changes brought by the program is self-confidence,” she noted in a recent interview with Bishalakhi Ghosh, the director of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation that is posted on the Alcatel-Lucent blog site. The Foundation started ConnectEd two years ago with World Education.
“With this self-confidence then comes motivation and self-belief by the youth that they can achieve better things,” she said. “At World Ed we refer to this a lot, we call it self-efficacy – it’s a mixture of having the belief that you can do something, as well as having the skills to do it.”
ConnectEd tries to do both by inspiring young adults to better themselves and also assisting them with the training necessary to reach their goals. Self-confidence is key. In fact, ConnectEd tries hard to surround those it helps with people who will foster self-confidence.
“Whether it be training in mechanics, computer classes, taking part in a youth group or after-school tutoring, youth everywhere in ConnectEd are surrounded by caring adults who believe in them, who help them gain a better self-awareness, who build on their strengths and who listen to them,” she said.
Since Alcatel-Lucent is a technology leader, when the program was launched more than two years ago it was decided that digitization of education and tools would be a focal point of the program. So far it has provided digital training to 12,513 youth, 60 percent of them girls, according to Day.
Around 1,000 staff from Alcatel-Lucent have volunteered with ConnectEd which directly benefs at least 3,300 youth, according to Day. The volunteers perform a wide variety of activities. These include clothing donations to training teachers in ICT, to helping youth get jobs by doing interview simulations.
“They’ve been helping to facilitate workshops on financial literacy and careers development, giving tutorials in difficult subjects like English, and in a number of the ConnectEd countries, youth have visited Alcatel-Lucent offices to get an inside look at the world of work,” she noted.
Overall, Day is proud of the program and what it accomplishes.
“The majority of the youth we work with, most especially the girls, really don’t have role models in their daily lives that can inspire them to take a different path in life, to open their eyes to other possibilities.”
When it comes to community outreach, it does not get much better than bringing a volunteer from Alcatel-Lucent to act as a role model. It literally can make a world of difference.
