The Unbeatable Spirit

I got started in this line of work in 1987 when I was a young, idealistic volunteer. While Hong Kong grappled with a sustainable solution to the tens of thousands of refugees who were arriving from Vietnam, my role was to teach them professional skills so that they could get jobs. What I quickly learned during those exciting and often chaotic years became the foundation for everything Christian Action (CA) does today and helped propel us to become one of Hong Kong’s largest training and retraining organizations!

The specific skills we teach today are completely different from when we were teaching refugees how to use a PC DOS computer. But they are still very much informed by what the market is demanding. For example, we train our students at the Digital Centre on essential technical skills in manual and automated software testing, which prepares them for a career in the IT field. We even do collaborations, like with Teen Future Academy, who co-sponsor the ACE IT Talents Project Software Quality Assurance Training course! This includes career seminars, resume-writing workshops, and more, so the graduates are ready to start their careers immediately.

The third Cohort of the course was just launched earlier this month, and it is wonderful to see how the instructors have improved and built on what learned since the first Cohort, which graduated last November. During the first Cohort's graduation ceremony the students shared their learning journeys, recounting how they went from having almost no IT knowledge to mastering professional skills with their teachers and friends. A caring moment was when they shared their heartfelt thanks with their respected teachers by presenting them with exquisite homemade gifts.

The teachers also shared their observations, noting how the students not only mastered professional knowledge of software testing but also developed teamwork and problem-solving abilities in the process. We firmly believe that the students are ready to face the challenges of the future!

A big congratulations to them all!
Siew Mei