Our Sri Lanka Story: Chapter One
It has been quite a whirlwind in Sri Lanka for the past couple of months and it’s not even monsoon season! Ubiquity has just entered the local market and is making quite the splash.
We are partnering with a number of key education service providers and social service organizations to educate, inspire and galvanize changemakers across the country.
With The National Institute for Business Management (NIBM), we will be rolling out our blended “Foundation in SuperSkills” program. This four month course, offered first as a pilot, will be available to all NIBM students in the future and will give them a taste of the critical soft skills they need to succeed in today’s world. The same program will also be rolled out in March with Sri Lanka Technological Campus (SLTC) for all incoming students. This program is a pioneering endeavor because, for the first time, it represents a formal attempt to link High-Tech Education (provided by most traditional academic instutions) with High-Touch Education (provided by Ubiquity). By leveraging local partners’ experience in technical skills and combining this with Ubiquity’s expertise in holistic education and soft skills development, these partnerships will enable Sri Lankan students to develop critical competencies in leadership, mindfulness, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, emotional intelligence, cross boundary team building, resilience and global thinking. These competencies will give them the complete package of skills they need to succeed in the competitive, ever-changing job market of the day.
We are also going to be very involved with AIESEC (the largest student organization in the world and Ubiquity’s global partner) and The Lions Club (the largest volunteer service organization in the world) to provide students nationwide with the opportunity to develop their competencies through Ubiquity’s offerings, and engage in social service projects within their local communities. Many female Lions Club members have already participated in our “Women in Leadership” nano course and more than 50 Lions willalso be taking our “Leadership in Disruptive Times” microcourse in January 2019. These partnerships are exciting because they truly represent what Ubiquity is all about – education for change!
It’s been a hectic time but it has also been extremely fun and rewarding. Our happy-go-lucky CEO, Jim Garrison, has been bouncing around between Colombo and the rest of the world and, as he always does, is making things happen. Shelly Alcorn, our COO who seems to have more than twenty four hours in each of her days, also paid us a visit to meet with local students, and has been hard at work refining our curriculum to suit various market and target groups. And, last but not least, our Director of Admissions, Matt Robertson, has moved to Sri Lanka just to make sure that our students are happy and engaged. I am thrilled to report that it took just one weekend on the beach to convince Matt to hang around in Sri Lanka indefinitely!
Our program with NIBM was launch on January 23rd with subsequent partner rollouts planned for the near future. I can’t wait to update you soon with more happenings from sunny Sri Lanka.
