Baku, Fineko/abc.az. An international youth contest Skills@Work Challenge has been held in Sofia, Bulgaria. The event was organized by the British Council jointly with Junior Achievement.

The British Council reports that the contest involved 56 students from 10 countries.

“In the contest Azerbaijan was represented by students of professional-technical musical schools, Azerbaijan State Railway Lyceum and Guba Lyceum. In the final the students groups were mixed and new teams were formed of mixed nationalities.

The project’s aim is to influence national vocational education policies in providing a larger role for businesses and industries in the professional training of their future employees.

The event’s sponsor Microsoft chose e-governance as the theme for the first Skills@Work international challenge. By developing projects to respond to the challenge the young people demonstrated their visions of civil society and services that an efficient government should be able to provide to its citizens and businesses by electronic means.

Four teams grabbed the prizes of the jury for their excellent ideas and presentations.A special award was given to Sattar Orujov’s team 11 who demonstrated the best communication within their group. They had offered electronic road and night club surveillance systems (Comp-alarm) to provide round the clock security in the attempt to reduce traffic accidents and other incidents caused by drinking or abuse. The team consisted of students from Azerbaijan, Israel, Romania and the UK.

The third prize went to a team with Arzuman Allahverdiyev for their offer to governments to introduce personal devices with personal data access to be used by individuals in voting, tax payments, access to their bank accounts and other financial transactions. The device will be protected by means of fingerprint recognition technologies and visual identification of users. Other three young innovators in this team were from Israel, Macedonia and the UK.

The second prize, provided by the event’s main sponsors Microsoft went to a team, who presented a programme for electronic transfer of documents to be added as a free download by Microsoft but generating income to users who register their own profile.

And the first prize of the international final Skills@Work Challenge went to a team that presented a system facilitating voting which includes voting over the internet and mobile telecom networks,” it was reported.

Skills@Work focuses on developing the skills young people need after they finish school to be successful on the labour market.

01.04.2009 12:24