Help unemployed Thai with IT work-study program

Dear Partners, 

This year, one of our most important goals is to recruit 3-5 disabled adults as apprentices who would join us for 18 months of training in partnership with another FCF project called Stronger Together. To fulfill this goal, we held three IT Fundamentals (ITF) classes with 5-6 disabled participants each. Our ITF classes are designed to introduce IT to unemployed adults who do not have an IT background. We do this in order to encourage people to consider joining the growing IT industry in Thailand as well as to help them improve their life and/or job. The ITF class consists of five different IT subjects including hardware, networking, internet, programming, and security. When the class is over, we evaluate the students and invite those we think would benefit from further training to our Programming Boot Camp (PBC). This week-long program introduces the basics of web application development. From the disabled participants who attended our ITF classes this year, we selected five to attend our PBC. Out of the five participants, we have selected three to be our new apprentices. 

One of the benefits and challenges of this program is our partnership with a government Foundation called YardFon. They have about 70 disabled adults living and training at their compound in Mae Taeng. They are preparing them with working skills and teaching them to live independently. This includes an IT training program that teaches basic office application skills. Those were some of the students for which we had a chance to provide further training. Since the students live there, we were able to use their computer labs to do our training. This all worked out very well. The main challenge came when we selected our apprentices and realized they would have to relocate near our office. We had prepared our office for training disabled adults but could not accommodate their living arrangements. This led us to our third partnership with the McKean Foundation. They have small houses for two people that are accessible for people with disabilities. They can also provide transportation and other facilities as needed. Everything is coming together to help us recruit the apprentices and provide them with the resources they need to become IT professionals. 

We are excited to welcome Mr A, Mr T, and Mr N to our apprenticeship program. They will start about May 1 after some minor renovations are completed at McKean. This will be a new experience for all of us and we will happily share the journey with you. When you partner with us financially, you are also participating in this journey. Everything should be ready soon after the Thai New Year break (April 12-14). We will also be continuing with new ITF classes after the break as well. 

Exciting News! We just finished renovating our office/training space to make it handicapped accessible. In addition, starting today, we have our first batch of disabled students starting a week-long IT Fundamentals class. These students are unemployed adults with disablitlites who have a high school or lower education. Those who do well in this class will be invited to our Programming Boot Camp for another week-long training. Eventually, from all these classes, we will recuit 5 full-time apprentices for up to 18 months of intensive professional programming and app-building experience. We are very happy to get back to training. Hope you will be join in us in wishing these students well on their learning journey.

Thank you for your ongoing financial support to make this kind of training possbile. 

Hi Friends, 

Here are the latest updates from our Academy. Since our last report, we have had two more IT Fundamentals classes and one more Programming Boot Camp. In addtion, two of our Trainees became Apprentices after finishing their basic web developement courses. They are now working with our experienced staff who are helping them develop professional programming skills. They are aslo working on real projects along side our team to help other non-profits to be more effective and efficient by using web apps. 

Finally, Mr Guy, our first Apprentice has finished his program and is now a full-fledged staff as a part of our team. He has come a long way in 18 months from not knowing anything about web developement to now being a professional web developer. 

Our hope is to continue giving those who do not have an IT background a chance to change their lives by learning basic IT skills and if they have potential, recruit them for our Web Development and Apprenticeship program. We started training adults who were unemployed due to Covid but now many have found employment and are not free to do full-time training. So we are partnering with another organization to start focusing on those with disiabilites and lower education and therefore fewer chances to be employeed. This month we hope to find out if we received a grant we applied for months ago to start training people with disablities.

Thank you for your ongoing partnership. 

Since our last update in November: 

• We created a fully self-paced course for IT Fundamentals that was launched in December. Over 20 students have taken the course so far. We also added two new courses. A Photoshop course in January and a programming Boot Camp in Dec and we repeated that course in early March. 

• Overall in 2021 we had 11 IT Fundamentals (ITF) Courses (Onsite – 7, Online Conference – 4) with 43 students. By the end of the year, we had recruited 3 new staff for our intern/on-the-job training programs. One (Mr Guy) was promoted to Apprentice last August and Mr Indy was promoted to Apprentice in February. Mr Prin will likely be promoted to Apprentice as well in about 1 month. Once they become an Apprentice, it means they have passed the basic programming skills courses and will be applying their skills to real apps as part of our Product Team. In this process, they learn professional skills in team work and development skills like testing and deploying software.

During this Covid era, we wanted to help people who lost thier jobs and were intested in transitioning to the IT industry. The ITF course allows the trainees to discover their own potential in IT, leading to an understanding of basic IT tasks such as building a computer, connecting devices (networking), writing websites and apps, and protecting computers from IT crimes and viruses. These may lead them to future work, whether it's working in an IT job that hasn't been done before, adjusting positions, raising salaries, or even transferring knowledge to others, especially family members.

As examples, Mr James and Mr Tony were unemployed due to Covid. Mr. James, after training in a ITF course with us, he later got a job in web development, worked for 2-3 months, was promoted to supervisor, received additional salary, supervising 3-4 people. After the ITF course, Mr Tony got a job in IT networking.

In addtion to helping people undertand IT, we are trying to recruit trainees that ultimately could help increase our capacity to help more Children's Homes with apps and IT training. The goal after their training is that they would have the skills and experience to go out and get a "real" job in the IT industry.  The three trainees above are already adding capacity to our team. We had hoped to recruit at least 2 more ITF students to join this work-study program. However, we still need to fund the current trainees before we can recruit more. 

Thank you for partnering with us. Please consider a giving a regular monthly gift to support our current trainees. New monthly supporters will have 1 month's gift matched by GlobalGiving.