IBM Team Equips Mechai Pattana Students with Life-long Skills

Friday 07 December 2012 10:31
Workshop with students is part community engagement programme to mark IBM Thailand’s 60th Anniversary Celebrations and promote volunteerism

A group of IBMers recently teamed up to help the students of Mechai Pattana School develop marketing and communications skills in a full-day workshop.

Working with the Mechai Pattana school teachers, 20 volunteers from the IBM Marketing and Communications function established two goals for their efforts — to equip students with understanding of what marketing is, why it is important for non-profit organisations and the approach to branding strategies, and to enable students to apply the knowledge to their existing or future projects.

As part of the Anniversary celebrations marking IBM’s 60 years of enabling business and societal transformation in Thailand, the company has embarked on the 2012 Manager and Team Happy Volunteer Programme. This activity at Mechai Pattana School is the first of a series of community activities under this Programme, which is aimed at encouraging employees to dedicate their knowledge and expertise for the betterment of Thai society, and in turn promoting team work and integration among employees.

The IBM team used activity kits from the IBM On-Demand Community, a website providing resources such as presentations or educational modules to prepare and equip IBMers volunteers worldwide to assist schools or community agencies. The team conducted a full-day workshop with 28 tenth-grade students at the Mechai Pattana’s ‘campus by the sea’ in Pattaya, Chonburi province.

Founded with the aim to grant poor, rural students with opportunity to be educated in an open learning environment that promotes individualism and creativity, Mechai Pattana School emphasises project-based learning that will help develop problem-solving skills, and enhance the ability to analyse and create amongst its students. The education model encourages students to have a passion for life-long learning and education outside of the curriculum and classroom. They firmly believe that this will prepare them to be young leaders in their fields that can nurture social enterprise and have a positive impact within their community.

In the day-long workshop, the field activities included knowledge sharing session where volunteers introduced students to the foundation of marketing and branding strategies designed for social enterprises. Students were then divided into small groups, which were then assigned to plan and present marketing plans on 2 selected topics. The students learned how to market and brand their local product, including how to promote their social enterprise using marketing and branding strategies.

“The students at Mechai Pattana School are so open and eager to learn, and have the potential to become leaders who can make a difference to society. Through the experiential learning session on marketing and branding, we hope they will continue to apply the principles that they learnt, to what they are doing, in order to gain more support from society and stakeholders, thereby achieving results with greater impact for the society,” said Warut Sirawongprasert, a volunteer from IBM Thailand.

“The full-day workshop by IBM volunteers was very useful. The marketing and branding guidance certainly helped both teachers and students gain a better understand of the ways to make our existing or future community projects gain greater traction and have a bigger impact. The training also addressed our aim to enable students with extra-curricular knowledge and learning process applicable to activities in their fields of interest,” said Mr Mechai Viravaidya, founder of Mechai Pattana School.

For more information, please contact:

IBM Thailand Co., Ltd.

Piyanute Thongjiem

Tel: 02 273 4416

Email: [email protected]