In a recent slate of three customized skills-based volunteering projects, Team4Tech connected skilled volunteers from Zendesk with one of our strategic NGO partners, Passerelles Numériques, to develop and improve learning resources for staff and students.
Creating Opportunities for Youth Through Digital Education
Passerelles Numériques (PN) is a French nonprofit organization working in Cambodia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Madagascar with a mission to unlock the potential of youth in under-resourced contexts by providing them with access to education and the means to acquire key technical and soft skills in the digital sector. PN offers training to young learners at its centers in Southeast Asia, as well as a university preparatory program in Madagascar.
PN’s goal is for every student to find quality employment that is tailored to the needs of the local technology market, enabling them and their families to escape poverty in a sustainable way and contribute to the social and economic development of their communities.
More than 800 students currently study in PN’s centers and 2,900 have graduated since PN started in 2005. An estimated 92% of PN alumni find jobs in less than two months after graduation, resulting in 12,000 people lifted out of poverty, which includes alumni and their families.
Skilled Volunteers Support Improving English Professional Communication Skills
In the first project, Team4Tech matched PN with seven skilled volunteers from Zendesk to create a collection of English-language workplace communications training materials for PN Cambodia staff.
During 5 weeks of virtual collaboration, Zendesk volunteers created templates, guidelines, role-play scenarios, teaching activities, and other text, audio, and video resources covering a variety of work-related topics.
The resulting deliverables will allow PN Cambodia to design a curriculum for its staff and learners with practical content from native English speakers to improve their communication and collaboration skills. Deliverables generated by skilled volunteers included:
- Business email writing: general guidelines and email templates; examples and activities for writing memos
- Meetings and presentations: sample language for inviting, scheduling, and attending meetings; videos modeling small talk and presentation scenarios; documents with example text to follow up after meetings, give feedback, and use visual aids
- Negotiation and persuasion: a slide deck with sample language for negotiating terms, deadlines, and agreements
- Problem-solving and conflict resolution: common phrases and structures used to address issues and concerns; role-play activities for proposing solutions and alternatives
- Interview and hiring process: sample interview questions, answers, and expressions; a checklist for writing vacancy announcements
Skilled Volunteers Develop Content for a New CX/UX/UI Curriculum
In the second project, five skilled volunteers from Zendesk developed educational content in Customer Experience (CX), User Experience (UX), and User Interface (UI) for new classes at PN’s training centers in Madagascar and Cambodia.
After four weeks of virtual collaboration, Zendesk volunteers delivered an introductory set of training content for learners (ages 18-23) in their first year of technical training at PN.
PN’s teachers and training staff will use this content to create a curriculum module for students. The materials create a foundational introduction to CX/UX/UI for students with little to no background knowledge with a focus on the Zendesk software available to PN.
The topics covered included:
- Defining CX/UX/UI
- Importance of CX/UX/UI
- Career paths and skills needed to work in those domains
- Essential tools for UX/UI
- Brief overview of the Zendesk software
- Practical applications of CX software
What I liked the most about the Team4Tech experience] was being able to contribute to teen’s futures and getting to work with new people from different areas.”
—Carolline Pinheiro, Volunteer and Product Designer, Zendesk
Volunteers Review and Update Coding and Web Development Activities
For its two-year training on web development, PN Cambodia uses an online platform to gather and assess over 300 web development and coding exercises for its students. In the last skills-based volunteering project with Zendesk this year, volunteers reviewed these training exercises and their English guidelines, suggesting updates and language changes to improve the quality of the exercises and relevance of technical and soft skills training for students.
Team4Tech was very supportive and made the project possible. T4T worked to clarify the deliverables at the end and coordinated with the volunteers to be aligned with the timeline. The project will help the English trainers to design adapted training material to the workplace.”
—PN Cambodia Training Team
This series of projects is one example of Team4Tech’s global contributions to education. Our organization continues to accelerate the impact of nonprofit organizations globally.