I don’t know about you, but back in my school days I found it pretty damn hard to imagine how I was going to turn my learnings into practical skills one day.

However, in the past decade, there’s been a real mind shift. I blame the internet.

This mind shift is now emerging as organised movements. Private companies, NGOs, policy makers, parents and educators are all advocating for an introduction of real life skills into curriculums.

There are two major driving forces causing this. Firstly, both kids and parents are becoming customers of the education sector. They have demands and expectations relative to the price they pay.

Secondly, private companies in certain areas are struggling to find a skilled workforce and are lobbying governments to use education to solve their hiring issues.

Industries that are becoming most affected by the skills scarcity and mismatch, like the digital sector for example, are mobilizing their efforts particularly well.

The objectives are clear: teach more practical skills. The issue is though - how do kids and vitally, their teachers, get to understand what these skills are and where do they start? In other words, how do you keep them as close to the reality as possible? Without harming the things teachers do best.

I’m imagining the structure of the solution to the above challenge a bit like a climbing a ladder. There's three stages to it: Awareness – Motivation – Application. Awareness feels like reaching that first stepping stone, Motivation is the moving force that gets you excited and to which you can always return, and Application is where you put things into practice and deliver. You climb up.

Skype in the classroom has been offering teachers the opportunity to virtually bring expert guest speakers into their schools for the last few years.

The great thing about this activity is mainly its cost and time saving character which enables experts to connect with more classrooms then they could physically visit in the same time.

Teacher gets to decide how long the session is and how it fits within their instruction. Both teachers and kids love it. Going back to the ladder metaphor, here we have the awareness and motivation boxes ticked.

To directly address the growing digital skills gap, Microsoft decided to leverage this existing behaviour and create a guest speaker program for Skype in the classroom exclusively dedicated to Computer Science professionals.

This is when Guest Speakers in Computer Science was born.

The goal here, as you’d probably guessed by now, is to raise awareness about careers in tech by bringing software engineers, designers and product managers to classrooms to talk about their jobs and their career journeys.

Talking to real people about how they build games and manage projects that impact millions, we hope, will do the trick and get kids more excited about taking those STEM subjects at school and beyond.

By being directly associated with code.org’s #HourOfCode, this program not only helps kids to get on the ladder but to also keep climbing.

They can kick off their very first coding session in a matter of minutes once they have embraced its importance.

We feel extremely privileged to have worked with Microsoft to extend Skype in the classroom to make it easy for teachers to become part of this inspirational program.