Thursday Oct 8, Mo Money

This Thursday Mo Money was opened by Ahmed Marcouch, Alderman for education in the neighbourhood council Slotervaart, Mo Money is a temp agency in Amsterdam Slotervaart, a part of Amsterdam with very high unemployment rates and school drop outs. And also the neighbourhood where the IBM HQ is based. Mo Money is a “temp agency +”; which means they also offer debt restructuring and coaching in the job, which sounds great. But from the name, location and opening speeches I got the feeling that they have a focus on male Moroccan school drop outs. What about Moroccan girls? Or school drop outs in general. Ludwig Caupain, manager of Mo Money stated that everyone is welcome, but will this be attractive enough for all unemployed young people?

This brings up the question what is the most effective way to use all this energy, support and resources? Point solutions for a particular target group or an integrated approach from elementary school to employment which can be adapted to personal needs? What do you think?

Tuesday Oct 6, KidSmart Young Explorer Assembly in The Hague

I know it, but it keeps surprising me. Every time we call for volunteers, colleagues from all parts of IBM step forward to help. On Tuesday we had a KidSmart Young Explorer assembly event at HCO the school service bureau in The Hague to assemble computer furniture designed for toddlers. The KidSmart early learning programme is designed to help children who don’t have Dutch as their first language to improve language and communications skills before they start elementary school thus increasing the effectiveness of the lessons and improving school results and job chances in the long run

Last week we called for volunteers to assemble the KidSmart Young Explorers for schools in the Hague which finished the basic ICT training and my colleague Revi with 10 volunteers from HCO and IBM working for the Ministry of Traffic, Public Works and Water management spent a day and an evening together building the kids computers

Thanks! To everyone involved.

This was an interesting evening: in the IBM Amsterdam Forum we hosted an evening course for 16 young people, age range 15 to 25 years to help them to increase their job chances. The IBM evening course on “leadership” is one of a series of lectures and workshops presented by Amsterdam based companies like ING bank, Boer& Croon, Accenture, and Randstad to help these young people to find a job. It is based on the US founded project Track the Talent and organised by Hart voor Amsterdam.

It is hard to predict the effect of these evening, what can we do to inspire them? What really appeals to the way of thinking and behaviour? What works and what doesn’t work. Usually I give an introduction on working at IBM, working in science, working in an office environment in general and after a quick tour through the office we do some role plays with Marc, who is a professional performer to practise difficult situations like applying for a job, feedback on other people’s behaviour etc. Tonight’s class was not the most responsive one we’ve seen and than these are energy consuming events with mixed feelings. But this was an exception; most youngsters are motivated and eager to learn, those evenings give us new energy. Looking back after 3 years Track the Talent I remember many of the students and specially the ones who were successful in the quest for a job.

Congratulations!

“Congratulations on your selection to the Corporate Service Corps....” This was the first line of an e-mail I received on May 22. Just one e-mail in long list that morning. So I closed it, skipped to the next one, looking for e-mails that needed handling this morning. This couldn’t be for me. I’m CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) manager for IBM, in the months before I presented IBM’s Corporate Service Corps to many colleagues in Netherlands and Belgium. Some came back to me and asked for more information on how to apply and what to expect; this was probably an email someone forwarded to me to inform me his/her application was successful. An hour or so later I worked through the e-mails again and found to my surprise it was meant for me!
“Wow, that’s great!” and after a split second “Oops, how can I break this news at home?” I told I was going to apply for the CSC programme, but I also told that there would be thousands of colleagues competing for a few hundred seats; probably several tens from Europe and probably a handful of places for Netherlands. So nothing to worry so far…