Making Some Headway

Monday, despite not getting an ideal or restful sleep on the bus ride back to Santa Cruz, I went to work hoping to make some headway and make the most of my remaining time left. It’s quite surprising how quickly a week goes by!

Part of my mandate was to provide some advice and suggestions on FTE’s current modules for youth training. On Friday (Aug 2nd) , I was given a copy of the booklet they give to the students, with worksheets and groups activities (approximately 30 pages) along with the teacher’s training manual (300 pages). Given that it was all in Spanish, my translator and I had our work cut out for us. 

Between Friday and Monday, we managed to translate the booklet and the key/relevant parts of the training manual so I could get an idea of their teaching methodologies and highlight the parts of the manual that should be updated or has a gap in material. With the help of my colour coded sticky notes, I was able to single out the sections where there seems to be missing some information.

On Monday and Wednesday, I created some documents, compiling information from public online sources as well as from my own experiences. The documents covered information from CV building tips, sample resumes for both high school and college levels, job search and job application guides, the fundaments about what to look for in an employment contract and basic customer service skills. Additionally, I assembled some group activities and exercises that emphasize team building and communication skills, which in North America are often done at the beginning of the school year or during office retreats as “Icebreaker games”. Once again, with the help of my translator, I was able to translate all of my documents into Spanish.

Wednesday afternoon, I had a meeting with the director of FTE (René) and one of the project managers/organizer (Sulma) and presented my suggestions and notes based on their existing training booklet and manual, as well as all the documents that I had created over the past few days. They were quite impressed and from the impression I got, they were definitely open to my suggestions. René even suggested that we go through a couple of the icebreaker activities together with all the employees at FTE. Definitely looking forward to that!