Skills Enrichment Learning Foundation

If there is a will there is a way. 

Coming to USA as a foreign student, I had no money and less than perfect English in 1988.  I would still be struggling at a semi-professional job if I did not try hard.  With only 3 formal accounting courses at college, Accounting Principal, Auditing and Management Accounting, I was able to self study (without any test preparation course) to pass CPA (with attestation), CIA (Certified Internal Auditor), CMA (Certified Management Accountant) and CFM (Ceritifed in Financial Management). 

These certificates may not be the main reason for me to get a job, but have for sure played a part in my career. 

But even with all the accounting creditentials, most people value me mostly for my integrated knowledge of accounting and IT.  Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint are really the job skills for today.

But I realized that help can come in many ways.  I designed a training program that is mostly self-study. We can only help people who wish to help themselves.  Our program would provide the tools, try to motivate them and work with them.  Wether if that will work, will really depends on if they want to do it.

One may ask, what good does knowing "office skills" do to these group kids. They may have problem even handling their school work. Before answering your question,

1. Do you know anyone with a desk job not knowing Excel or Word?

2. If you are an employer, will you hire a 18 year old, with no job skills just out of a group home?

3. To be certified in such environment with little experience nor backgroud, does that proof the person is intelligent, determined, love to learn and deserve a chance. Will you hire someone like that for a job they do not know much about?

That's why we started this project. I will not base our success on how many of the kids get their certificates. If they learn a few things to prepare a resume, that will be great. If they learned nothing but realized that someone cares about them, we would have achieved our goals.

Fortunately, our small seed of giving has generated more response I can image. Lei, a professional of IT and business has generously offered tutoring, consulting and help to setup a network for the group home, he even donated a laptop. Robert, offered to help fix dontated laptops, help the kids with computer questions and would host some workshop in the future. As a matter of fact, any help would mean so much to the kids, as most of them had no place to go on the holiday seasons. Their smile, last time when we visited with gifts, will be on my mind forever.