Telefónica Public Policy & Telefónica España Regulatory teams
Through its work with schools, the Think Big Youth programme of Telefónica has arrived to the Czech Republic to offer digital skills training to 1,200 school students in 2013 and give them the chance to become part of the programme. Think Big School is a new initiative of Telefónica, which aims to promote the entrepreneurial spirit of students of second and third year of secondary school. Telefónica launched the initiative under the Think Big programme in 2012 in collaboration with Mozilla and Junior Achievement Young Enterprise, and expects to enroll 50,000 students in the European countries where it operates by 2015.
More than 270 students and 45 Telefónica employees have attended the first 9 events organized by Think Big School in the Czech Republic. In these events, students spend a day in the offices of Telefónica, where company experts show them the assets of digital tools such as Thimble.
One of the greatest concerns shown by the students that have been trained by Think Big School in the Czech Republic has been achieving a social change. Therefore, most of their proposals are oriented to achieve this goal. Young people that are already part of Think Big Youth exchange experiences with the students and give them advice on how to achieve their goals. Some of the projects that students manage to develop in an interactive working day at Think Big School are campaigns to collect funds, proposals to change their schools and digital applications to make new friends. At the end of the working day, the different teams of students present their projects to the rest of their mates and to a jury formed by three experts that assess each of the projects.
Once the students have finished Think Big School they should:
• Know how to increase their chances of employment
• Have increased their digital and entrepreneurial skills
• Have increased their trust in the creative processes to propose an idea and take it to action
• Know what working at Telefónica is and which are the different roles in a digital company
• Stay in contact with formal roles that will provide them support and motivation
Telefónica Think Big Youth programme is led by Telefónica Foundation and has already been launched in the UK, Germany, Ireland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Spain. So far, Telefónica Think Big Youth has helped young social entrepreneurs to launch 3,500 projects that have benefited more than 65,000 young people.
We will keep you posted about new initiatives and the progress of Think Big School!
