Building Bridges in Education

According to Statista, between 2000 and 2019 the number of students in high school have been increasing. There were around 601 million students in high school in 2019. Guatemala had 157,318 students graduating from high school, which represents 0.03% of the students who were in high school in the world. Every year students who graduate are evaluated with standardized evaluations in foundational skills (Language and Mathematics). Our data refers to the year 2019 because it’s the last year these evaluations were implemented due to Covid-19.

From the evaluated students, in Language, only 37.03% reached the minimum required level and only 13.56% reached the minimum required level in Mathematics, according to the information from the General Coordination of Education and Research (DIGEDUCA) from the Ministry of Education. There is no data available on students on durable skills when they graduate and apply for job positions, but there has been a big demand from companies to get qualified people to take their available positions. 

In 2019, an analysis based on the companies in Guatemala through LinkedIn identified the following durable skills as the most important: creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and time management. In the Guatemalan formal education there is no program that schools develop that helps the graduates develop these skills. With the changes the pandemic brought the graduates not only lost spaces to improve their knowledge but also spaces to develop the hard skills they need.

The solution consists in a series of 40 online training hours, based on The Human Skills Matrix, where high school graduates get trained to become stronger candidates for the work environment. 

Due to pandemic restrictions, the training sessions are going to be online, using Google meet, Google Classroom, Google Drive, and other tools available for online teaching and training.

The solution will serve 80 graduates from high school from the highlands in Guatemala. They are going to be 5 groups of 16 participants each. The solution is going to impact their lives because the hard skills they will develop are going to prepare them to look for professional or educational opportunities after graduating. With these skills, they are going to become stronger candidates when they apply for a job position or interview for a scholarship. 

During the pandemic school years, the students’ skills developed in formal education lacked well thought out strategies from the teachers to acquire better results and this was due to not having trained teachers to develop an online or blended learning process at school. Other factors like having the need to work before finishing school, have also affected these high school graduates. By developing their hard skills, like critical thinking, negotiation, management between others, the graduates are going to be able to better analyze their options to get the best option for work or education after high school. This solution would complement the formal education program the students have.

Imagine Academy is located in Sololá, in the highlands of Guatemala. We have participated in different educational projects where we have been able to identify key characteristics from the youth in the region that have given us the experience to work with them. We believe it is important to identify these characteristics and the skills teenagers possess in the region, as well as cultural aspects. Guatemala has specific needs in each region and the highlands is not the exception, thus it is important to work with the schools and parents to be able to get the best results from the process. We have worked with different institutions, training their students and staff in different skills, and this has helped us understand the context where we want to develop our solution. 

Working with the youth in the highlands we have been able to identify specific needs in different stages of the formal education system. Processes in the formal education system can take many years to get a policy and be approved. There have been some changes in the national curriculum that the Ministry of Education has implemented but it has been implemented in all the whole country, which is good, but it is also a barrier. When policies are established, it does not guarantee that the teachers, who are in the classrooms with the students, are trained to develop this process in the class. We are specifically talking about the hard skills in the training process; even though they are included in a course graduate students have to take, teachers in the classrooms are not trained in the topics to be able to get positive results. We, as solvers, want to get support in training our staff in the technical processes to develop the Human Skills Matrix which we consider is going to give graduates a good tool to be ready when they transition to higher education or professional career. 

With the experience we have in project development in the highlands and working with private and public schools, we can see that the process for Human Skills workshops is a process that has not been developed as a complement of the formal education in the schools. The positive impact this is going to have on the high school graduates is going to impact the processes that follow, either higher education or job opportunities.

The impact goals for the first year, based on the Human Skills Matrix, are the following: 

1. Describe the ‘human skills’ needed to succeed in today’s and future workplaces.

2. Identify their own tendencies for a minimum of five skills. 

3. Recognize when skills are needed in different work experiences. 

4. Use diverse feedback from workshop experiences to initiate a personal growth plan.

The impact goals for the next five years are: 

1. Identify the changes, after a few years of the plan, each participant makes.

Assessments based on rubrics to identify the knowledge of each of the aspects from the Human Skills Matrix. 

1. Percentage of participants who get a job after they take the training sessions. 

1. Percentage of participants who finish a higher education degree in 3 (technical) or 5 years.

The training sessions based on the Human Skills Matrix are developed online for personal and professional growth with the high school graduates. 

The participants gain skills in understanding each of the matrix components, analyzing, evaluating and creating their own personal life plan. 

The participants identify and recognize each of the aspects from the Human Skills Matrix and start a personal life plan.  

The participants evaluate the progress they have based on their life plan, either at the professional or personal level.

The technology that the solution is based on uses the Human Skills Matrix, which according to J-WL, “It has developed a best-of-breed model for understanding the soft skills that will be key to workplace success in a world of increasing automation. By examining 41 existing frameworks from across multiple sectors—including human resources firms, educational institutions, education-corporate research partnerships, and labor organizations—MIT researchers were able to identify the most sought-after skills across all. This list was then reviewed and ranked by a panel of experts drawn from the human resources, post-secondary education, workforce and public policy, and research fields. The resulting 24 top skills have been further organized into a matrix of categories focused on 1) how we think, 2) how we manage ourselves, 3) how we interact, and 4) how we lead.” This framework matches perfectly with the lack of training that the formal education system has for high school graduates. There are no specific programs, in private or public universities, that develop this type of training.

We believe in having similar access to training no matter the race, age, or gender. In the organization the team leader is formed by a woman, who is the administrative director, and a man, who is the academic director. We try to have a gender balanced group but in recent years we have had more experience in working with women, who in the region have less access to education.

We provide training in different areas for students and staff for companies. The programs can be planned on a regular or intensive basis, or personalized based on the participants needs. We are working online due to COVID–19 restrictions. We also offer free content on learning English through our Facebook and instagram pages. We work for the community in general, emphasizing on people who want to get the skills to learn a new language. We work through individual students who want to access the regular program or through organizations who give scholarships to their staff.

We want to develop this program with donations to cover the basic expenses but also to cover the administrative staff to guarantee it reaches its goals. In the future it can become a sustainable program that either students or schools would like to have as a service thus making it sustainable, reaching the goal and reaching more graduates.  

We have not received financial support from any other organization, we have worked with this through volunteering activities.