A consultancy report for a project

    Write a consultancy report for a project that is being done with Microsoft. The idea behind the project is that Microsoft employee volunteers have created a program called Nurturing Communities. The purpose of this program is to provide an academic platform that Microsoft will deliver to partnered Nonprofit organizations (NGOs) to use in helping individuals from underserved and underrepresented communities of different types—inner city youths, refugees, tribal, indigenous, military spouses, reformed prisoners, etc.—in joining the tech industry as Microsoft 365 Entry-level support engineers. The goal is to help them make a strong impact on their families, the communities in which they reside, and the global economy Currently, there are multiple nonprofit organizations implementing this program across the world. My part in all this is to create an intake navigator (a component of the Nurturing Communities program that consist of the recruitment process and how candidates in the program will be measured). So, I am not working on the entire program itself. In creating this intake navigator, I created two separate models: the recruitment model and the competency model. The recruitment model is about screening applicants to see if they will be successful in the program or not and to create a recruiting standard that all NGOs should follow as to avoid divergences that could see some NGOs recruiting unmotivated applicants or using standards that could prove to be bias. The competency model is to simply measure the performance and readiness of the candidates. What I need done is the green highlighted areas below. Please have the references be done in endnote reference format. Background “Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” (Microsoft, 2022) Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Since its establishment, more than a billion personalized computer using Microsoft’s technologies have reached the desks of homes and businesses around the world, with that number set to increase as access to the internet begin to be viewed by governments as one of the fundamental rights of being a human in modern times. In addition to building the foundation for technological advancements and achievements, Microsoft has also made distinctive contributions to the continuance of positive societal and economic impacts in countries around the world by investing in philanthropic campaigns and working with non-profit organizations to empower individuals to bring about positive change. Much of what has been done, and will be done, are very much the product of Microsoft’s mission and vision statements, of which is about contributing to a societal ecosystem that connects the benefits of technology to drive inclusive economic growth and empower individuals and organizations to create a more sustainable future). In pursuit of its commitments, Microsoft over the years has collaborated with partners in different industries to expand digital infrastructures to tackle issues relating to digital exclusion, access to information and technologies to help people participate in the opportunities created by the growth of the global economy, and so much more. The Nurturing Communities Program was founded as part of Microsoft’s commitment to empower employees to create products and services to help others achieve more. The purpose of this program is to create an unconventional entry point for individuals from underserved and underrepresented communities (i.e., inner-city youths, refugees, tribal, indigenous, military spouses, reformed prisoners, among others) to join the information-technology field as entry-level Microsoft 365 support Engineers and eventually branching out into other roles (Worth, 2020). The goal of the program is to bridge the gap of economic opportunities for marginalized individuals and empower current and program alumni to make positive changes to society and communities in which they reside. At the moment of this writing, Microsoft have partnered with different nonprofit organizations around the globe (i.e., Asian University for Women and iUrbanTeen) in administering pilot programs to test the curriculum and gather data for future improvements and a full-fledge launch. Scope of Work In broad terms, the objective of this consultancy work is to establish standards that Nurturing Communities’ pool of nonprofit-organizations can use in determining how applicants can be appropriately screened for during the recruitment process, and what mechanisms of measurements should be used in measuring the performance and readiness of the program’s candidates. The work will be done around the following areas: 1. Identifying and confirming the prerequisite competencies 2. Developing assessment tools and techniques 3. Identifying and confirming skills information required for support and placement 4. Designing the database to hold the participant data 5. Developing a process for entering and retrieving intake navigator data. This consultancy work will be exclusively focused on the recruitment process and candidates’ competency component of the Nurturing Communities program, including all related matters. Other aspects of the program will be excluded from this work, such as partnership recruitment, determination of teaching materials, community outreach, and so on. Challenges In its current state, the Nurturing Communities program does not have strongly formulated recruitment standards in which partnered NGOs can use in their candidate screening and selection process—this include the finalization of success factors to be considered. Although the NGOs do have their own recruitment parameters and standards that they will follow as to properly adapt to local needs and cultures of the marginalized communities, the risk of allowing them full autonomy could potentially cause divergences leading to discrepancies in the quality of candidates; it could also result in the misallocation of program resources on candidates who are unlikely to finish, amongst other things. Moreover, in the interest of helping individuals from underserved and underrepresented communities in bettering their lives, the program must prescribe recruitment standards as to ensure the minimization of judgements based on unfair factors, such as biases towards one particular group over others. In other words, recruitment standards are needed to serve as a starting point for the NGOs to fairly screen their applicants based on certain characteristics, qualities, and traits to see if they will be truly successful while in the program and after graduating from it. The act of such structural implementation will make the program more equitable, more diverse, and makes recruitment applicants easier once the program scales up. Need statistics to support why having shared standards in the program will help the program itself, the involved NGOs, the candidates, and potential employers. In addition to the challenge of the absence of unifying recruitment standards, the Nurturing Communities in its current iteration also does not have definitive measurement standards that are shared with partnered NGOs to measure the performance and readiness of their candidates. Due to the international distributive nature of the program, measurement standards are of great importance as they would allow candidates to be measured comparatively to each other much simpler than they otherwise would be, despite where they are in the world. Another reason for its degree of significance is that the measurement standards would make it so that candidates meet all the required knowledge and best practices of the program before entering the world force in the information-technology field. Without such standard, it is plausible that the NGOs might end up developing inconsistencies in how they measure the performance and readiness of their candidates, resulting in the candidates not being properly prepared to take on support engineer roles after graduation or any other roles in the information-technology field. Also need statistics to support why performance and readiness standards are important the program itself, the involved NGOs, the candidates, and potential employers.   Findings a. After doing research and consulting with the internal Microsoft team, in additional to external research, we were able to define recruitment variables (grit, experience, soft & technical skills, time commitment, and English competency) that applicants should have to join the program. i. We found that the answer to this dilemma is to administer a self-assessed, automatically scored candidate survey with 4-5 selection of pre-written answers for each question. Every question will be tied to a recruitment variable and because of that, each final answer will be scored differently, depending on the variable that is being assessed (i.e., technical questions will be scored higher than that of soft skill questions). We believe this to be a perfect solution as a weighted, numerical grading system will make filtering applicants easier and will work when the program become much bigger than it is now, which is one of the requirements or needs of the internal Microsoft team. b. We created tools of competency models and skills matrices to measure current performance of students who were selected for the NC program. Then tracked throughout the duration of the program (time placeholder) with a performance tracker. The performance tracker allows readability on high performing categories versus areas needing improvement per individual student. Serving as a tool to be measured (per module completion), Nurturing Communities hopes students can translate a successful experience to increase the likelihood of job placement after program completion. Recommendations c. Administer self-assessed, automatically scored, predictive questionnaires to screen applicants to determine if they would be successful. i. Emphasis on questions about technical skills and experience—indicators of success d. Use the tailored charts as specialized tools to rate and assess the current performance of students i. Those tools will measure these areas: grit……. e. Assess a Longitudinal study (one or two years) as program begins to scale to understand what candidates (in performance-based roles) would answer to the recruitment questions to gauge what attributes they have and other characteristics that successful candidates should demonstrate or have. i. “Identifying and collecting the needed data to build an understanding of the long-term implications among the NC participants to improve our ‘hire’ rates, ‘job’ satisfaction, and effects on the community. Then, inform workforce development systems, strategies and investments.” – Microsoft ii. To scale the curriculum to fit iii. Study on post-graduate students, both successful and unsuccessful to obtain factors that led to success or unsuccess. iv. Why? To further improve the program as it gets bigger, and more NGOs are on board with implementing the program. f. Measure the economic, community, and family impact of graduates. i. To show that Microsoft/NGOs is invested in the families on a deeper level, which will potentially bring in more prospective students and volunteers from other companies and not just Microsoft.