Download - Amal academy: Year 1 Lessons Learned
“we have a lot of ideas in our head, but we
don’t know how to talk about them and so we don’t get job offers.”
“Life is going a bit tough… It’s been a year that my mother passed away and since then I am fighting with depression and loneliness… Your lecture boosted me a lot to see things in a
positive way and try not to stick to negative things. Instead of sticking negative things I try to add some positive meanings to the incidents of life. I remember your examples, that was the
most motivating factor for me.”
“The session was superb and I definitely got the most
from the videos, but it would be good to show more
Pakistanis” .
During our ini*al research, we believed that there was tremendous opportunity for us to provide so; skills training for students in technical/voca*onal training programs. Throughout the country, there are hundreds of hard skills training centers, however, less than 10% of them are teaching so; skills. Employers have iden*fied this as a major gap and the government is now planning to invest heavily in this type of training. Addi*onally, the opportunity to make an impact here is significant, given that nearly 80% of these students dropped out of school and earn less than 20,000 PKR a month. Given the significance of this opportunity, Amal ran a one-‐month (40 hour) pilot with a small group of students at Descon Training Ins*tute, in order to determine if we can enhance their so; skills. Unfortunately, we discovered that weren’t able to achieve the type of impact that we wanted, primarily for the following reasons:
As a result, we realized that we need to focus on industries and student popula*ons where we can make the most difference, and then eventually incorporate those lessons and successes in order to reach more marginalized communi*es, such as voca*onal students.
-‐ Language barrier: we needed to transliterate the majority of our content into Urdu and Punjabi, and some of the impact was diminished as a result
-‐ Industry knowledge: given that we don’t have experience recrui*ng for technical/voca*onal skills, it has been difficult finding jobs for our students
-‐ Timing: Due to *ming constraints, Descon wanted to complete the program in 40 hours; given that only 20% of our students studied beyond 8th grade, however, we believed this was not adequate *me to move the needle.
Try to love and live the questions now. Perhaps then you will
gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers.
- RM Rilke -