“Together with our partners, we have designed an Authentic Career Experience program which will highlight skills taught in a traditional school setting and give students the opportunity to practice these skills in a professional environment and with professionals,” says Jamila Sams, Program Director of Mentor Foundation USA.Julie Whipple, Corporate Social Responsibility Manager for QlikTech explains that: “Qlik has a strong history of CSR where we engage in and support programs both globally and locally. Here at our headquarters we are at a point of trying to figure out how we can have a bigger impact locally at the same time as we engage more of our employees in community outreach programs.”
“Helping our youth succeed and make healthy choices is important for QlikTech,” Julie states, adding that: “With the help of Mentor Foundation we now have access to a more structured platform using Mentor’s expertise in mentoring programs to serve youth very close to our home.”
“With QlikTech’s comprehensive corporate social responsibility programs and strong commitment to youth it is simply a perfect company for us to partner with,” said Gunilla Girardo, President and CEO of Mentor Foundation USA, adding that: “We are very excited about our expansion into Pennsylvania and I believe that we have found a good model for collaborating with the business community in making our program accessible to more youth across the US.”
One of the objectives of this program is to encourage students to think critically and analytically within a professional teamwork environment and motivate youth to pursue their goals. At the end of the program, students will have the opportunity to present a synopsis of their findings to Qlik associates and their teachers, and they will tour the QlikTech headquarters to learn more about careers within the company and the software industry.
“Qlik is about the visibility and value of data”, explains Julie. “It is great that Mentor Foundation USA can help us bring our technology, business solutions and thinking to students. It’s difficult to understand what problems you’re facing—and why—without data to support it.”
Students who are interested in technology and statistics will be selected to participate in the program, and will utilize QlikTech’s product, ‘QlikView’ to further analyze and dissect the data and respective results of their projects.
“Our work with QlikTech will also focus on the importance of developing the soft skills needed to compete in today’s evolving workforce,” Jamila explains, adding that: “Our Authentic Career Experience program is an experimental learning opportunity for high school students that combines classroom theory with real-world application and practice. This is much more than a ‘take your kid to work day’. It will challenge students to think and explore talents and opportunities they may not have been aware of before.”
In explaining QlikTech’s view on CSR, Julia says that: “With Qlik’s CSR program ‘Change the World’ we try to push the existing boundaries governing what people think business is capable through a CSR program. Our three key elements to reach sustainable results are: community, environment and people and we like to challenge ourselves, our partners, and our community to help us achieve our goals.
We also offer a software grant program by donating products and services. This helps non-profit organizations, including universities and high schools, make sense of complex information, gain visibility into data sources, accelerate outcomes, and make their great work even better.
QlikTech, founded in Sweden in 1993, has pioneered new ways of transforming data into meaningful information. Their product, QlikView, is the leading business discovery platform, providing user-driven business intelligence (BI) to a variety of organizations worldwide. QlikView makes data associative, creating easily understandable visual relationships across multiple, complex data sources. Today they serve approximately 32,000 customers in 100 countries.
We invite you to learn more about QlikTech by visiting their site: http://www.qlik.com