Three years ago in June 2012, SAP Spain founded a partnership with Fundacion Tomillo, a foundation which aims to contribute to social improvement and individual development, undertaking a variety of initiatives, primarily focused on the most underprivileged members of society.
Knowing that Spain´s unemployment rate was close to 25% those days (even more than 52% for the younger generation, which brought the country to the highest level in the EU), the goal of this partnership was to use SAP skills to drive education, and access to specialized training.
In line with one of the key criteria of SAP´S engagement, creating and supporting economic opportunities in the communities where we work and live, SAP committed to provide highly qualified technological training to young and long term unemployed people with few resources to improve their employability and their social abilities.
What started as an adventure has become a “classic” among the initiatives that year after year, SAP Spain executes in Madrid. Over the last 3 years, professional teachers and more than 30 SAP voluntary employees, taught the basis of SAP components (FI-CO mainly but also overviews on MM, SD or
HCM modules) and soft skills to help the participants join the labour market again. In total, more than 300 skilled volunteer hours have been
provided to 60 students so far.
(Please check the following video to find more details about this initiative.)
The SAP volunteers are from different departments (Training, Field Services, Active Global Support, Sustainability, CSR, Sales and Presales, HR…). Some of them have participated as instructors, while others help with the coordination of the project and designing program and materials to use during the course.
We are fully aware of how important is to measure the impact of our initiatives. And for this reason, we do a follow-up on the participants employment rate and if the job placement occurs or not in SAP ecosystem. Thanks to this follow-up we know that 2013 edition was one of the courses with the highest employment rate of all programs taught in ... We are very happy with this figure because our final goal is to help participants to find a job.
We are already working on the 2015 edition that will keep the same format as that of 2014:
- Professional teachers and SAP volunteers: we have evolved from a pure volunteer program to a mix initiative.
- Give the same importance to social skills and SAP training: the first editions focused mainly on SAP knowledge.
- Continue with our follow up on job placement but also, as we initiated in 2014, started to measure the improvement in participant’s social abilities thanks to the training they have received around this topic
We continue making improvements in the initiative but our goal remains the same: to keep, and increase, 2013 edition employment rates for the following ones and help the participants to re-join the labour market. The latter, is the reason that motivates all of as: Fundacion Tomillo, participants and SAP´s employees.
Cristina Antelo,
