linkedin.com/alicengatia , Date: 2024/2025
At Eastlands College, we designed the programme around two halves that TVET students rarely get in one place. Schneider Electric colleagues brought real grounding technical know-how, as well as the soft skills a business actually runs on. From marketing to finance knowledge, different experts taught each piece, so students learned every subject from someone who lives it.
The second half was about belief: helping students see themselves as builders, not just job-seekers, then bringing in a working entrepreneur to tell them plainly what that looks like once you’re in it.
We built this because that expertise was too good to keep in-house, and a room of TVET students was exactly the right place to put it to use. The impact runs both ways: students leave with sharper instincts across both the technical and business sides of building something, and the colleagues who volunteered their time leave having taught, which is its own kind of growth.
