 Good morning everybody, Buenos Dias. I am Ambassador Ivan Sierra, Executive Director of the Institute for Mexicans Living Abroad. The agency of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico that deals with the relationship with the Mexican diaspora worldwide. This year we are extremely happy because it is the 30th anniversary of the programs that seek to make a contribution to the educational development of the immigrant communities, also to widen the access to healthcare and to educate about health prevention and also to promote cultural ties with Mexico and improve financial literacy among the immigrant community. The 30 years that we have been working with the consular network have been extremely fruitful thanks to the excellent efforts undertaken by the 50 consulates that Mexico has spread in the territory of the United States. We also have six consulates in Canada and overall we work worldwide. We have the opportunity to forge partnerships at the local level with many allies that are in constant communication with our consular offices and of course with our diplomatic missions. Today we are honored that the Embassy of Mexico in Washington DC is promoting this closer dialogue with a very important player in the online education field in the United States. The non-for-profit sailor academy which started as a sailor foundation with the goal to promote broader access to educational opportunities. We thank our ambassador Marta Barsena and the great team at the Embassy of Mexico for this opportunity. We will have this conversation. I hope this is an actual conversation. I mean not only we will learn a lot about the great work that the sailor academy is doing and we have the opportunity to have a closer dialogue with two of the members of the staff of the sailor academy with Jacqueline Arnold and Matt Gorman but also I sincerely encourage every one of my fellow consular officials that are joining this conversation to engage to ask a lot of questions because online education is a great source of opportunities but also it is a very specific area if we really want to have the opportunity to promote broader access to online education. We have to educate the public. We have to provide answers to our diaspora community and that means that we have to ask timely and pointed questions today. This is a great opportunity to do so. I would like to introduce Matt Gorman who is going to address the audience and after Matt we will have the opportunity to learn about sailor academy with this conversation with Jacqueline Arnold. I think Jacqueline and I think Matt and we will be paying very close attention to this conversation. Thank you very much. Muchísimas gracias embajador. Mi nombre es Mateo Gorman y serbo como becarrio de asociación asociaciones extrajitas en la academy sailor. En nombre de Miguel sailor nuestro fiduciario Jeff Davidson nuestra director exectivo y la academy sailor querremos agradecer a la embajador a la embajada a la embajada y al instituto así como a todos los exictos exictivos de los mismos por incluirnos en esta importante iniciativa. La misión de sailor es brindar oportunidades de aprender sejan y habilidades y educación superior a personas de todo el mundo. Con nuestros cursos en línea gratuitos brindamos acceso a aprender sejaje y por lo tanto mejores oportunidades laborales y debida a cualquier persona en cualquier parte del mundo. Este esfuerzo es especialmente interesante para mí porque tuve la maravillosa oportunidad de vivir en España durante cuatro meses de universidad y mi hermano pasó cuatro meses de sus años universitarios estudiando en Guanajuato, Mexico. Gracias y ahora me gustaría presentarles a Jack Lenonu directora de relaciones y estrategias y comunicaciones. Gracias Jackie. Thank you very much Matt for that welcome. Thank you also to special thanks also to the embassy of Mexico and the embassy and the institute for Mexicans abroad and congratulations on your 30th anniversary and thank you so much to ambassador Sierra for inviting sailor academy to speak. As everyone has mentioned, my name is Jack Lenon Arnold. I'm the director of strategic relationships and communications for the sailor academy and I hope to share with you a little bit about the skills gap and what its implications are for Mexico and how how its citizens can regardless of wherever they are have opportunities to close their own skills gaps by upscaling for a better career and future. So the global skills gap is in short that's the difference between the skills that employers are looking for and the skills that the population has available. Sometimes it also manifests itself as the ability for people to access opportunities to learn those skills. So a couple of the implications for the skills gap in Latin America four out of 10 firms are having difficulty finding the appropriate personnel that have the appropriate skills that they need in Mexico itself that increases to half of employers are having difficulties finding the staff and employees that they need and when firms and when employers can't find the personnel that they need that may cause them to do things such as outsource. So that's taking jobs away from whatever location that they are in or they risk losing productivity and competitiveness and then having to shut down after that which also can impact the jobs that are available. Of course that difficulty also manifests for employees themselves in that they may just need a course or two or exposure training to be able to do the job but on paper it doesn't look like they have the skills and that's an opportunity lost on both sides. So another way to look at a skills gap is when the employer end not being able to recruit or train or planning for the recruitment or training of millennials which we know have a different skill set than the previous generations. So there are 30 million millennials in Mexico itself that's a quarter of the population and nearly half of firms in Mexico said they are not prepared to really be able to translate their positions into ways that are desirable for this population. So this is another way of looking at the skills gap itself where there's a communications gap between the opportunity that's available and the skills that are needed to get a person into that position. And again just this graphic shows that if you'll look at the green area here the kind of light green area here this is a lack of technical skills the orange band kind of matches my at just my outfit here is a lack of soft skills and these are also kind of key components that are keeping people from being able to enter into the positions that are available. And again this it's not just in Mexico of course this is something that's happening worldwide but we need to think about different ways that we can help the population one learn these skills both technical which includes software and using different types of applications or machinery as well as soft skills which are interpersonal skills and leadership skills. We need to give people opportunities to learn these skills and then show them how to demonstrate that they have these skills so that we can make the matches in between skills and positions really for a better economic future. So what are the skills that are in demand so if you are a trainer or if you are a job seeker you need to demonstrate that you have emotional intelligence or interpersonal skills communication skills kind of a broader way of looking at how you communicate or work with people critical thinking is important problem solving English skills English will continue to be important of course it helps if you are multi-lingual but English is also a kind of a language of commerce in many locations so that may be also a path to showing that you are more marketable and the skills that are needed really span across industries so the graphic that I shared I apologize that it's a little bit blurry but hopefully you can see that this really spans industries so this is just a sampling so sales which include all of these skills accounting skill trades so even if you aren't even if you're doing something that's more technical emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills are going to be needed because you may have to talk to a client or you may have to work demonstrate leadership and project management with other coworkers so regardless of the industry you're looking to get into these skills are necessary and so how do we provide opportunities for people to be able to learn these skills well the opportunities need to be low cost they need to be quick and they need to be easily accessible to ensure that the most amount of people will be able to access them the digital format is a great way to achieve all of those things most people have access to either a computer or a phone and if there's a way to translate those skill learning opportunities to that format that's an easy way for them to access that without the burden of cost also other institutions so a government can promote a skill initiative which I'll talk about a little later or a higher education institution can offer opportunities for people to learn skills or employers can kind of carve out time for their employees to be trained so that they continue to be continued to be productive and marketable and grow and change as the company grows and changes but I really do think that digital digital resources are a great way to start to help citizens learn new skills and remain employable so this is one way where a sailor academy comes in so as Matt has mentioned earlier sailor academy is a non-profit education initiative we're committed to ensuring that people have access to educational opportunities no matter where they are in the world at any time and we do that by providing free online courses these courses have been created by university professors who have teaching experience as well as the appropriate academic credentials to teach the course in a college setting online and so we offer courses that introduce higher education subjects general education subjects such as business administration computer computer science chemistry economics but also we have career focused skills such as interpersonal skills decision making leadership to help give citizens the opportunity to really be able to build their portfolio and learn their own skills our courses are available at your own pace so you can start a course at any time and you can finish it when you have the time available students have the opportunity to show their new skills by furnishing a certificate and I'll show you some pictures in just a moment of some students doing that we're also very proud to have an English as a second language series of courses and again all these resources are available for free so we hope that you will consider us as a skill development opportunity as you're looking at either developing a training program if you are an employer or as you're looking for your own skilling needs and so these are some great pictures of our students demonstrating their certificates so going from left to right I believe the gentleman in the upper corner is from Nigeria the gentleman in the bottom I believe he is from the Philippines and then in the upper right hand corner that gentleman is from Egypt and in the lower lower right hand corner that young ladies from the US and we're really really proud of our students there they are learning this independently even though they have opportunities to engage with other students and really taking on something new and it is quite an accomplishment to get through these courses and so we're as proud as they are and I love to see that this gentleman has framed his certificates we're even prouder of them and proud of our learning community again just to detail some of the subjects that our students are engaging in our career skill focused and professional development focused courses include the leadership decision making management kind of introduction to management subjects and customer service so these courses are short and they are great for earning the skills that you would need for an entry level position or for a position that would be transitioning from entry level to maybe a more middle management level type of position our English is the second language series we currently have three courses published in that series we have a plan for five ESL 004 should be published sometime later on this year and these courses are really designed to take someone who's had no exposure to English all the way to a English level that would be appropriate for studying in a university setting that was solely in English so we're really proud of the series this is something that our students had asked us for they were actually enrolling in something else and then asking us for an English as a second language course so we're really proud to be able to offer that for free and students earn a free certificate for this course that they can use on their own portfolio or send to an employer to prove that they've been studying in English our skill development partnerships we're really proud to be published in the GIA Educativa that's part of IME's digital education guide we're also a knowledge partner with eSkillIndia.org which is a partnership of the National Skill Development Corporation in India and that's a digital skill development program that they have and we've been partnering with some international inter universities who'd like to offer some skill development opportunities as a supplement to their students education so we we know that we can partner with any government or NGO a nonprofit who's interested in offering these type of these types of educational opportunities to their constituents and we look forward to continued collaboration with the Institute for Mexicans Abroad as well as hopefully we can develop an initiative to serve all of Mexico itself as well and here is an example of a student who has used Sailor Academy courses to be able to complete a distance education degree or a degree in a distance education program rather that has since earned his associates degree and now Krishna Raj who's the student who provided the testimonial here is actually based in India and earned a degree in the United States with our partner Thomas Edison State University using our courses as a distance education course and to fulfill educational requirements so we partner with several higher education institutions that accept our credit in this manner and I'll talk a little bit about how that works as well because that's another gap the people who are looking for a university education that may not be near university or may not have the funds to start university right now but they have the time and the drive to do it we're a great bridge for that kind of program as well so our higher education partners as I mentioned before we have a subset of courses that have been reviewed and recommended by a U.S. Education Association called the American Council on Education and our since our courses are created by subject matter experts who are university faculty we also internally have our courses peer reviewed which means another group of faculty review the courses for academic rigor make sure they're accurate that kind of thing the American Council on Education reviews programs like ours to see if they would if these courses would then be eligible for university credit if they're equivalent to a university a university course if you will so we offer a college algebra course would that be the same as would you learn the same things in that course as if you were taking college algebra in a university setting so the American Council on Education has reviewed our courses and for a certain segment of courses that said that that is the case so how students would do that is they would take our course for free again all of our courses are free at their own pace and once they finish the course they can then take what's called our direct credit exam and when they take that exam if they pass they will get a transcript from the American Council on Education that says that they have passed college algebra they can then send that to an institution and say you know I would like to waive the college algebra requirement I've already taken the course and they would receive credit for that for our partner institutions particularly and there are some institutions outside of that that accept our courses for credit and when we partner with universities in this way again there's no cost to do any of that we are a nonprofit and we want to help students on whatever ever path they're choosing whether it's the career or university we want to help them as they're advancing and hopefully they come back to us to learn even more one of those special university partnerships as we partner with a U.S. university called the University of Memphis and they have a program called Finish Line that helps students that have left the university to come back return to graduate and so far we have helped 713 students do that when they take some courses with us and they don't have to incur any more student debt for that because our courses are free and then they work through a process to evaluate their work experience etc etc to see you know where their requirements where all their requirements match up and we really love this program because we're helping students save money these are students who were very far along in their degrees they were seniors before they left the university and we've been able to help them come back and change their lives so this is a great program just another great way that we're able to partner with universities and institutions so as I've said before we can really partner with any kind of institution that's looking to increase access to education for their communities there's no cost to partner with us we partner with nonprofits and we have a great nonprofit partnership with an organization called Central Union Mission that does workforce training for as well as faith-based transformation for men who've experienced homelessness in DC where we are based in the DC area I've mentioned the government and workforce the skill development programs including the Ghiyaj Kativa the skill development program with eSkill India and we hope to expand that and really be a part of those initiatives to help people maintain their employment and be more marketable and our partners our university partners of course are very near and dear to us because in that we're helping people earn degrees and hopefully go on to a better future there so we hope that you'll continue consider working with us as well we look forward to talking about other ways that we can work with you all in the in the consulates and at the Institute for Mexicans abroad and we are really enjoying our partnership with the our work together with the embassy of Mexico and we hope that becomes a more solid partnership but I thank you all for your time today and I'm not sure if there's an opportunity for questions but if not here is my contact information and I'd love to answer any questions that you have by email please feel free to reach out to me thank you very much hello Jacqueline thank you very much um on behalf of the ambassador Marta Varsena of the embassy of Mexico uh ambassador Sierra the the the Institute of Mexicans abroad we really want to thank you and thank uh uh Sailor Academy for this uh very insightful presentation and we hope as you said as you mentioned we can continue this partnership for a long time in in order to benefit more and more Mexican and nationals and families here in the u.s. and also in Mexico so thank you again and and uh and just a message in spanish thank you all for following this transmission it will be recorded in the timeline of our facebook follow us on social networks at Vamex Eua and also follow me at Sailor Academy thank you to all for joining us in this transmission see you later thanks for having me