Learning in the Digital World will be a key focus topic this week at the German IT Summit (
”IT-Gipfel“) taking place in Saarbrücken, Germany, with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel attending. SAP is actively contributing to enable people for the digital future.
As Bill McDermott recently said:
“SAP has embraced the view that training workers for a digital economy is our corporate responsibility. Going further, we believe that leading companies have a moral obligation to initiate people into the modern economy, regardless of where they come from.”
In this blog, I would like to give an overview of what SAP has been doing to provide open and free access to digital learning resources for many years:
- Sharing of educational resources for university professors: SAP University Alliances provides teaching material, including hands-on exercises, for professors to teach the latest digital technology and integrated business solutions to Batchelor and Master Students. Over the past 15 years, more than 900 courses have been created and are now available to the community of almost 3,000 universities. The content is built by the community and SAP and provided free of charge on SAP Learning Hub, academic edition.
- SAP Young Thinkers Network, a global school network and program aims to create excitement and unlock creativity of school kids to use technology in order to solve interesting real world challenges. It builds knowledge on Coding, Data Science, Web Design, Business Processes, as well as holistic and entrepreneurial thinking, team spirit and presentation skills. For example, with Design Thinking in mixed teams working on real-life challenges in a next-generation consulting format. To date, more than 700 schools worldwide have joined the network; amongst them international schools with a specific focus on IT topics (STEM excellence), along with schools with innovative and virtual learning methodologies.
- We have also supported many initiatives via our digital learning channels such as Skills for Africa, and EU/Africa/Refugee code week, to promote coding and IT skills to young people. To support refugee integration in German speaking countries, we enabled volunteers to set up language classes for refugees in their communities as well as promoting social entrepreneurship across the globe to help the world run better. Additionally, a new programming curriculum for refugees will be available in the near future.
Life-long learning is an imperative in the digital age. As many technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and IoT are progressing in an exponential way, we will continue to invest in making learning easier and tailored to the individual needs of the learner.
Dr. Bernd Welz, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Scale, Enablement & Transformation at SAP SE
