How Digital Training Content Helps Refugees, Youth, and Young Adults Shape Their Careers
A Collaboration between Deloitte and Volunteer Vision
May 11, 2021 /3BL Media/ - Digital connections are powerful and can shape the world for good. At Volunteer Vision we have known this truth for a long time and have been working with Deloitte since 2018 to share knowledge in a meaningful way.
Deloitte worked with Volunteer Vision, a digital mentoring provider in the corporate volunteering and diversity & inclusion sector, to create an online program that would support youth and young adults on their path to employment. With Volunteer Vision, beneficiaries from NGOs like Talent Beyond Boundaries and Learning Lions are matched with trained corporate volunteers of 100+ partner organizations and engage in a purely digital mentoring experience via video chat, while utilizing embedded e-learning materials.
This unique collaboration took shape over time with Deloitte providing access to content from its University training programs and Volunteer Vision providing the infrastructure and service to enable access to this content for mentors and mentees from their network of corporate and NGO partners. Through this collaboration, the ‘Career Skills’ mentoring program to develop critical career skills for disadvantaged youth and young adults came to be.
“We wanted to offer e-learning materials like info slides, videos, audio files and quizzes that would allow mentoring tandems to interactively learn together. In this way we wanted to support young people in their journey to employment, so they could actively shape their futures”, says Pete German, Digital Designer at Deloitte University. “The vision was to not just publish the content for free but to find a way to integrate it into a platform that allows disadvantaged people in society to receive impactful training, ask questions and access individualized support.”
“We at Volunteer Vision are grateful to have been able to work with Deloitte to bring this program to fruition. With the formal release in spring of 2020, the moment to introduce additional digital resources couldn’t have come at a more vital time, making the accessibility of high-quality training content a reality”, says Dr. Suska Dreesbach-Bundy, founder and CEO of Volunteer Vision.
The ‘Career Skills’ program is part of Deloitte’s '5 Million Futures’ initiative which aims to support and empower five million people to overcome barriers to education and employment by 2030. ‘Career Skills’ includes modules focusing on presentation skills, working in teams, and personal impact & networking. Since its release, ‘Career Skills’ has been rolled out globally and is now available to hundreds of young people across the world, supported by mentors from a large number of global players. Feedback from mentees and mentors shows the content has already been useful and creates a significant difference in shaping their professional lives. Up to 81% of mentees who participated reported that they greatly developed their skills in the areas addressed in the program content.
"With ‘Career Skills’, our goal is to help young adults to develop the skills they need to succeed and take control of their careers, a cause which is very important to us at Deloitte”, says Claire Burton, Director of Responsible Business at Deloitte UK. “This program enables us to activate the positive power of technology while maintaining a distinctly human element of support. The ‘Career Skills’ content is a meaningful and sustainable way of making an impact on people’s futures.”
About Volunteer Vision
Volunteer Vision is a SaaS provider for online mentoring solutions with social impact. Active in both the corporate social responsibility and diversity and inclusion sectors, their three-pillared approach to online mentoring combines the power of software, content and service to create meaningful, sustainable and responsible impact for the individuals and companies which participate. For more information, please visit www.volunteer-vision.com.
About Deloitte
In this press release references to “Deloitte” are references to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”) a UK private company limited by guarantee, and its network of member firms, each of which is a legally separate and independent entity. Please see deloitte.com/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of DTTL and its member firms.
Deloitte LLP is a subsidiary of Deloitte NSE LLP, which is a member firm of DTTL, and is among the UK's leading professional services firms.
The information contained in this press release is correct at the time of going to press.
For more information, please visit www.deloitte.co.uk.
About the Career Skills program
If you are also interested in supporting the ‘Career Skills’ program in your organization – or if you’re working in an NGO and your beneficiaries want to enroll as mentees – do not hesitate to get in touch with Volunteer Vision.
To hear directly from our mentors and mentees, take a look at our International Volunteer Day video!
