Offering seniors IT skills

A part­ner­ship between RSVP Sin­ga­pore and Microsoft Sin­ga­pore pro­vides IT skills train­ing to older work­ers to remain employable.

RSVP Sin­ga­pore — The Organ­i­sa­tion of Senior Vol­un­teers is part­ner­ing with Microsoft to enable seniors to bet­ter engage with soci­ety and to enhance their employ­a­bil­ity through basic IT skills train­ing. Under the part­ner­ship that was offi­cially launched last month, RSVP Sin­ga­pore received nearly $400,000 from the Microsoft Unlim­ited Poten­tial (MUP) in money and donated soft­ware over three years, along with $200,000 in dis­counted soft­ware and hardware.

Guest-​of-​honour Lee Yi Shyan, Min­is­ter of State, Min­istry of Trade and Indus­try & Min­istry of Man­power, stressed the impor­tance of engag­ing Singapore’s sil­ver com­mu­nity. “The employ­ment rate of res­i­dents aged 55 to 64 has been increas­ing steadily over the past five years, from 45.2 per­cent dur­ing the last eco­nomic down­turn in 2003 to 57.2 per­cent in 2009. Older work­ers rep­re­sent a grow­ing pool of sil­ver tal­ents with life­time of expe­ri­ence and skills. It would only be pro­duc­tive for com­pa­nies to find the best way to tap on these skills to bet­ter con­tribute to the com­pany. 
 
“One impor­tant ele­ment of pro­duc­tiv­ity is devel­op­ing a work­force with the right skills and exper­tise. For this, train­ing is impor­tant. The MUP pro­gramme allows older employ­ees to stay active and remain employ­able by impart­ing to them crit­i­cal IT skills. With these skills, older employ­ees will be more con­fi­dent to re-​enter the work­force or con­tinue to stay employed as a more val­ued and pro­duc­tive employee in the com­pany,” Min­is­ter Lee said in his address.

Fol­low­ing the Government’s lead in recog­nis­ing the increas­ing value of senior work­ers, Microsoft and RSVP Sin­ga­pore will work to expand its exist­ing Cyber­guide pro­gramme and develop new courses that will give seniors the com­put­ing and tech­nol­ogy skills needed to develop entre­pre­neur­ial or com­mu­nity employ­ment opportunities.

“As Sin­ga­pore comes to rely on older work­ers more, the value of being able to work effec­tively in a dig­i­tal world will be tremen­dous,” explained Jes­sica Tan, man­ag­ing direc­tor, Microsoft Sin­ga­pore. “A soci­ety that embraces its seniors and lever­ages their expe­ri­ence and insights is a soci­ety that will con­tinue to be successful.”

Since the incep­tion of its Cyber­guide pro­gramme in 1998, RSVP Sin­ga­pore has been proac­tive in cre­at­ing an IT friendly envi­ron­ment for senior cit­i­zens. “Our Cyber­guide pro­gramme has worked closely with com­mu­nity clubs and Gov­ern­ment agen­cies in help­ing to bridge the dig­i­tal divide by con­duct­ing train­ing courses in both Eng­lish and Man­darin. We started our very own IT Cen­tre in 2001 with the sup­port of Cen­tral Sin­ga­pore Com­mu­nity Devel­op­ment Coun­cil and the Rotary Club of Sin­ga­pore,” said Dr Philbert Chin, pres­i­dent, RSVP Sin­ga­pore. “Today’s MUP launch is another impor­tant mile­stone in our jour­ney towards mak­ing seniors cur­rent and relevant.”

Ulti­mately, the goal is to train 2,000 seniors in online and pro­duc­tiv­ity skills by 2011. Fol­low­ing the train­ing, RSVP Sin­ga­pore expects that at least 10 per­cent of seniors will be suc­cess­ful in find­ing full or part-​time employ­ment, find­ing new vol­un­teer or men­tor­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties or start­ing their own businesses.

Tech­nol­ogy upgrade

In addi­tion to pro­vid­ing IT train­ing for seniors to enable greater employ­ment and vol­un­teer oppor­tu­ni­ties, Microsoft’s invest­ment also cov­ers a tech­nol­ogy upgrade that con­sists of soft­ware to enable RSVP Sin­ga­pore to bet­ter serve its mem­bers and ben­e­fi­cia­ries, includ­ing Microsoft Dynam­ics CRM Sys­tem for donor and vol­un­teer management.

RSVP Sin­ga­pore is also imple­ment­ing Microsoft Exchange Online, which will let the organ­i­sa­tion offer all 1,000 of its mem­bers @RSVP e-​mail addresses and utilise the effi­cien­cies of Microsoft Exchange and Out­look with­out the cap­i­tal cost. Exchange Online offers Microsoft com­mu­ni­ca­tions and col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tions in a cost-​effective online form to help VWOs and other organ­i­sa­tions with small IT bud­gets and sup­port teams to ben­e­fit from enterprise-​class tools. Mean­while, recently trained seniors have been help­ing with data entry as the organ­i­sa­tion imple­ments the Dynam­ics solu­tion, which will give RSVP advanced soft­ware for man­ag­ing a diverse group of activ­i­ties and pro­grammes and fur­ther improv­ing its services.

Ini­tial response good

Accord­ing to RSVP Sin­ga­pore, the ini­tial response for the Microsoft courses offered at its Sil­ver Info­comm Junc­tion @ RSVP has been encour­ag­ing with 114 indi­vid­u­als par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Microsoft Office 2007 course alone. The Microsoft courses are accred­ited by Cer­ti­port and con­ducted by the Microsoft Cer­ti­fied Appli­ca­tion Spe­cial­ists. In addi­tion to its own mem­bers, RSVP Sin­ga­pore is work­ing through part­ners such as Com­mu­nity Devel­op­ment Coun­cils (CDCs), other VWOs and self-​help groups to iden­tify seniors who need IT train­ing for employability.

Cur­rently, three courses are con­ducted by Sil­ver Info­comm Junc­tion @ RSVP under the MUP pro­gramme. They are Microsoft Word 2007, Microsoft Excel 2007 and Microsoft Pow­er­Point 2007. These courses are con­ducted dur­ing the day and in the evening to serve the needs of both work­ing and non-​working seniors. Most of the classes are con­ducted in Eng­lish. How­ever, RSVP’s Cyber­guides have con­ducted classes in Man­darin when­ever there is a demand. 

For more infor­ma­tion on the Microsoft courses, call RSVP Sin­ga­pore at 6259 0802.

(PHOTO CAP­TION FOR ABOVE PIC­TURE: Min­is­ter Lee Yi Shyan gives out a cer­tifi­cate of com­ple­tion to senior, Gabriel Muthusamy, who com­pleted the Microsoft Cer­ti­fied Appli­ca­tion Spe­cial­ist course. On the left is Dr Philbert Chin, pres­i­dent of RSVP Singapore.)