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SAP Pathway Program

SAP is a multinational data management software company founded in German, providing data management solutions to business operation activities. The program stemmed from SAP’s vision that a global leader is responsible for the improvement of industry and SAP’s reflection on social funding usage effectiveness.

In the past, gifting, promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) learnings, and encouragement of entrepreneurship are SAP’s main contributions in corporate social responsibilities. SAP later revamped its social impact priority and wanted to bring a larger and more focused educational initiative that leverages SAP’s strengths as a leading player in IT industry. “SAP Pathway program” is the result of its social impact reinvention.

In SAP Pathway program, SAP positioned itself as a catalyst to help school systems integrate workplace needs in next decade into curriculum design based on SAP’s rich business operation experiences. Since technology driven industries are likely to be the major workplaces for most of the students today, SAP believes its IT experiences would benefit most students. In the program design, local high schools, community colleges, local governments, and SAP worked closely to develop a IT Pathway program for high school students to learn coding and IT related working skills by co-developing a new curriculum that fit to high school students’ level. This initiative is designed to be a sustainable program with the commitments from stakeholders across sectors, a program that may bring improvement to local economic growth and young talents’ academic and career outcomes.

Different stakeholders play different roles in the program. SAP is engaged in Pathway program by sharing technology workplace knowledge, co-developing curriculum that embed practical working skills, and introducing students to SAP professionals. By 2016, there were four SAP pathway programs launched in the U.S. and Canada. SAP sees its program design a blueprint that can be adopted by other corporates which want to engage in similar educational initiatives and encourages more industry leaders to take its program structures and adapt the structure to the local context where they want to launch the programs.           

Liaison ("Job for the Future")

Source: "A Blueprint for SAP Education Initiatives", Job for the future, SAP, January 2016