20,000 Students To Benefit From GSS High School Immersion Bootcamp

A total of 20,000 students, ages 16 to 20, will benefit from training and certification through the Global Services Sector (GSS) High School Immersion Bootcamp, beginning July 11.

The free training programme, being implemented through a partnership between the GSS Project and One-on-One Educational Services, will run for two months under the theme: ‘YES (Youth Empowered Skills) to Careers Unlocked’.

Interested persons are invited to register at http://gss.onexl.co. Classes will be delivered virtually, both live and pre-recorded.

Speaking at a Jamaica Information Service (JIS) Think Tank on Tuesday (June 28), Chief Executive Officer, One-on-One Educational Services, Ricardo Allen, said the programme will not only focus on careers in business and accounting, but also “next generation kinds of careers” such as information technology and industrial technology, for example engineering.

Mr. Allen shared that the programme will begin with an orientation exercise followed by the delivery of an enhanced job readiness curriculum.

“Through this curriculum, we aim to prepare students for the working world. So, we are talking about four weeks of intense online classes, case studies and having a whole lot of fun doing that; but certainly, ensuring that at the end of it, our students can get certified through HEART/NSTA Trust,” he said.

Mr. Allen noted that once the enhanced job readiness curriculum is completed, the bootcamp phase of the programme will come into effect.

“We’re talking about an intense workshop with our students led by industry experts – PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Jamaica Public Service (JPS),” he indicated, adding that students will develop an understanding of power generation, natural gas, and renewable energy, among other things.

Mr. Allen indicated that the University of Technology Jamaica (UTech) will provide support to the programme, by helping students to understand how to start a business, while Microsoft will teach participants about cloud computing.

GSS Project Director, Marjorie Straw, encourages parents to take advantage of the opportunity to enroll their children in the programme for the summer.

“This is an excellent opportunity at no cost. We really put a lot of thought in this programme, trying to ensure that it would be fun, end with a certificate, and that the child would be exposed directly to industry players,” she pointed out.

The GSS Project is a five-year initiative funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

It aims to provide Jamaicans with access to training and better jobs in the global services sector, which includes knowledge process outsourcing, information technology outsourcing and business process outsourcing.