Developing a future workforce today
Developing a future workforce today
An interview with Infosystem Foundation USA's Executive Director, Kate Maloney
The MakerEd Educators Forum will be held online on September 27-28. You can still register to attend. Friday is a day of presentations and Saturday is hands-on projects. Infosys Foundation USA is the top sponsor of the MakerEd Educator Forum, allowing us to welcome all maker educators to the two-days of programming. InfoSys Foundation might be one of the largest funders of Maker Education with its Pathfinder Summer Institute and the Infy Maker Awards. I enjoyed learning more about some of the programs they run, how they support educators, and some of their successes in funding maker education.
In this audio interview, Kate Maloney, Executive Director of Infosys Foundation USA, discusses her role and the foundation's efforts to bridge the digital skills gap through investments in computer science and maker education. Infosys is a global tech company, and its foundation seeks to enhance digital literacy from early education to high school, emphasizing inclusivity for girls, neurodiverse students, and marginalized communities. Maloney highlights key programs such as the Pathfinders Summer Institute, professional development courses, and partnerships with various organizations. She also addresses the importance of hands-on learning, community involvement, and the need for a diverse future workforce adaptable to rapid technological advancements.
Transcript of Interview
Dale: Let me introduce Kate Maloney of Infosys Foundation. Kate, welcome.
Kate: Thank you so much, Dale. It's nice to be with you. Hello everyone who's listening or reading. My name is Kate Maloney and I'm the Executive Director of Infosys Foundation USA. I've been in this role which I consider a privilege for the past five and a half years, and really working to advance our mission.
We're trying to narrow the gap in the digital skills realm through investments in computer science and maker education. And we have some really unique projects and programs and partners with whom we work in the maker education lane. And I think it's some of the most magical work that we do. So I'm happy to share today a little bit.
Dale: Yeah, that's great.
Overview of Infosys and Its Evolution
Dale: Tell us, just for those who don't know, what is Infosys, the company what they do.
Kate: Yeah, Infosys is a global technology services company or consultancy. They are headquartered in Bangalore, founded way back in the 1980s, and they had a period of time when maybe they were considered like the back office of companies in the U. S., but probably eight or nine years ago, they invested in six major cities in the U. S. where they have these dynamic innovation centers, and they're working to help Fortune 100, 500 companies go through digital transformation. And so I've had the good fortune, as I mentioned, to try to marry our foundations work in these six cities and then also work with partners nationally.
So they're in the AI first realm right now, like I said, in the digital transformation realm. And they still do a lot of the back office support for large scale companies. Multinational, I think we're in 53 countries around the world, in varying sizes and shapes.
I run the foundation out of our New York City office. We're in One World Trade on the 79th floor and have a spectacular view of Lady Liberty and then all the way up to the tip of Manhattan.
Dale: What I hope we'll get into after we talk about some of your programs is Infosys obviously hires and deploys a technical workforce and it seems to me part of your foundation's goal is to look into the future and say how do we grow that workforce? How do we find people that maybe today aren't, In that workforce but could be, and what are the paths to get them in there?
Pathfinder Summer Institute and Teacher Development
Dale: And I don't know if that's related to the name of your summer institute, but Pathfinder is the name of that program. And that's aimed at educators, isn't it?
Kate: Yes the way, Dale, you open that, I'd love to have you come to my corporate conference where I have to explain to many what is the foundation and why do we do it? Why do we invest in computer science and maker education? And that's exactly how I frame it to them. We think about the digital literacy and the skills needed for today's workforce, nevermind the kids that are born today that will be needing those skills in the world of 2042 when they graduate from high school.
So I try to present it. We have jobs that are sitting idle right now that require this tech competency, and we can't just create them out of thin air. We have to think back and look at what happens in kindergarten, what happens in second grade, middle school, high school, and into our higher education system.
So that's why the foundation believes in investing in teachers. We want these subjects introduced at a very young age, particularly with girls. We don't want to lose them into the universe of other temptations or the belief that they're not as equally capable as the boys in the classroom. And we learned that's even earlier and earlier, that we have to have those smart programs, either in the traditional classroom setting or in afterschool settings or in awesome makerspaces, if they exist, or libraries, and all of the community or youth serving orgs.
Stepping back, the teacher is the prominent beneficiary of the Foundation's work, and we have something called the Pathfinders Summer Institute. This is something we've been doing since 2018, and it has a history back to Indiana University where my predecessor had a relationship. In my first, felt like the first hour on the job, but in my first summer we went back to Indiana, Bloomington.
My first maker experience was in Adam Maltese's Maker Mill on the IU Bloomington campus and that's where much of this came to life for me. COVID threw a little wrench in our plans to have in person, but everyone pivoted beautifully that the professional development curriculum providers with whom we work and we have like a network of 35 or 40 of those and the teachers themselves. So we went Dale to a completely virtual model in the summer. This also due to feedback we heard from teachers. They loved coming to IU to have almost like a camp experience. We brought them there, they were immersed for a week, and they didn't just have the learning of a curriculum to bring back to their classrooms, but we gave them keynote speakers and other interactive moments.
Innovative Projects and Maker Education
Kate: Some of that faded away, but what we gave them instead is --Like this summer, which I'd love to just highlight, we offered 19 different courses and five or six of those were very specific maker education focused and teachers could pick. If weekends work better for them, they picked an offering multiple weekends. They wanted to take one week immersive? Awesome. And 1200 teachers were with us this summer. We had Makey Makey doing invention literacy. We had Chibatronics doing paper circuits. We had MakeCode doing intro to CS. And we had the Maker Educator Collective, who did something called robotics on the cheap.
But the point is that we believe that investing in the teacher, building their tech competency, their comfort level with these subjects, and then also their confidence. They're then going back to schools like the most challenged, Title I schools in particular, to really have the impact that we seek.
Dale: And I really like the practical focus. Here are tools. Here's how to use these tools. Here's how to help kids use these tools. And, here's how this fits into a class. And, the Makey and Chibitronics and all -- we have some wonderful tools out there to be able to be used but sometimes making that bridge for an educator of here's a something you could buy, but how do you actually apply it? How do you actually use it with kids? One of the things that also works is to get the educators using these tools themselves. They begin to see, Oh, that's how it works. This is what I could do with it. This is what my kids could do with it.
Success Stories and Community Impact
Kate: We have a parallel program to the institute is one we're getting ready for, Dale. It launches in a couple of weeks. So I'm not sure when people will hear or read our conversation, but our Infy Makers Award is something we do and have for the 10 years. And that I think through the example of who we grant these awards to, it also serves as inspiration to other Individuals who maybe have the spark of an idea. They don't have much budget, but their head is in the right space. They want to be inclusive. They want to inspire children to be creative, even with limited materials, and get them thinking that they can solve real world problems or problems that are immediate to their community.
And I was listening this morning back to one of our teachers. We recorded her testimonial and she works in Kentucky, like a really rural environment. And she got her kids thinking about what's a challenge that they see that they could solve through tech and invention. And a lot of kids and adults ride ATVs. And they go out into the woods and they sometimes have accidents and it's hard to get support to them quickly. So her students developed this whole drone technology that had emergency supplies to fly out into the the nether reaches of these rural communities and at least buy time for the safety of individuals.
We have those educators. We have cool teachers working in Memphis, Tennessee on tech wearables. So they're getting kids to think about the intersection of creativity of fashion and tech. We work really with educators all across the country who are trying to use things that are immediate, culturally relevant to children and students and introducing, like you said, that interdisciplinary passion.
Dale: I just believe a lot of the core of maker education is projects and being able to work and sometimes together in a team to develop something, start with an idea, but often like the example of the ATVs is coming up with ideas for projects that originate from the kids themselves, from the community they live in.
And it's not like a canned project, right? It's like not something that, oh, everybody does this. It's something that, how do we do this.
What I always felt about Make, we have these tools to create solutions. We just need more people to identify the problems, and really work through these solutions and they don't have to be products in the traditional sense.
They may just be. prototypes that are tested. And as much as you're coming up with a solution, you're also developing the student's ability to create new things into the future.
Kate: So we have one area that's like my biggest -- feels like my biggest win in these past few years. And that is up in Hartford, Connecticut. I had a little bit of a soft spot for Boys and Girls clubs from my past. And we were approached by the executive director in Hartford, which is where the clubs started way back 200 years ago.
And they had no STEM program, no STEAM program, nothing going on. They had the traditional sport, like heavy focus on sports. And we said what would it look like if we helped you create your first makerspace in the art room? So we started with one club with a 3D printer and maybe a couple of other offerings and now we are in six clubs, every club in Hartford, Connecticut That's really serving the most challenged, they now have a makerspace They now have a STEM director and they have kids like banging down the door to be a part of the program.
So they added on, they said we want to show you what these projects are that these children have created since they've had this offering. So we went to this STEM Fair. Children who are second grade through high school, they made 3D printed coasters, butterflies, pins. Some of the girls had a whole fashion wardrobe.
We had printed bags with our logo. And then we went to a group of boys that I think were third or fourth grade. They made a computer. They had the micro;bit. They had laser printed wood. They had all the wirings. And the power of it is that they stood proudly next to their project. And I'm sorry, but in the middle of the most urban Hartford challenged community, these kids have people making those projects, changing the access for them, changing the exposure, it gives them pride to know he built and that opens the door for them to then parlay into more projects, more interesting computer science. And then, like you said, a few moments ago, they can interview and talk about that experience and it's better than just basketball or just not everything is meant to be an athlete.
Dale: Absolutely. And that recognition and the pride that they feel for it, that it's theirs. I have to say that axis is something that I wish educators could get a feel for. Like when you give them assignment, tell them exactly what to do, it's your project , not theirs.
And when they come up with that idea and develop it and say, I made it red instead of blue and someone else made it green and I put this on it and that on. It's all those choices that they make along the way that define it as theirs. And if they can have the opportunity to take that home or to show it in their community. There's a phrase someone had --the things we make say a lot about who we are --and that's true for kids.
It's in ways that they might not be able to articulate in words. It says, I can do these things and I'm creative or I'm technical or whatever the labels are, but they don't have to say it.
Kate: And I think it also speaks to how their own culture, what's on their mind about the community in which they live or the culture they experience. It says like you're, like, articulating a lot of who they are, maybe what's troubling them.
Dale: Yeah,
Kate: This isn't exactly maker ed, but it's complimentary. We do a lot of web app design programs in some cities, and we give them the challenge.
What's the issue that bothers you? That you would love to develop an app solution for? And we get everything from climate to homelessness, to littering, to mental health, to procrastination. It extends. We could take that same group of students and put some materials on a table and ask them to come up with a solution to the challenge that is most meaningful to them.
And we get that same, we'd get, again, those are words we use as a foundation in our philosophy, that projects be meaningful, that they be culturally relevant, and that they be inclusive.
Steph Santoso, who you know is a senior fellow on our team, she beautifully articulated this a number of years ago, that our work in maker education is also that on ramp, that opening of a door to inspire even further pursuit of computer science education, and that's how we marry the two, or how we try to bring...
Dale: I've always thought generally if we can make this fun and playful, it really opens the doors to everybody. And then they can start to map out where do I want to go from here? How do I get to do more of it? But I really like that.
I've seen research on particularly on girls is, for them, it's not about the technology. It's about who is impacted by the technology or the solution, and I think, I don't think it's just girls, by the way. I think it's a lot of people. We don't just want to twiddle and tinker. We want to do something that's meaningful. And, that's why art is interesting.
I think it's an expression of yourself and it connects to other people. And I think much of this falls into that category as well.
Inclusivity and Diversity in Tech Education
Kate: We try through the foundation's work to have that national presence and to be in the pockets of need. But we also unpack that a little bit further to make sure we are bringing girls, the kinds of projects that resonate with them, girls who may also be neurodiverse. Girls. Girls who may also be speaking Spanish. They may be newly arrived in the U. S. And this is their only way to convey who they are. To feel they're still struggling with their language in a classroom, but perhaps through an approach that's more maker oriented, they can be hands on. They can come up with a solution and express who they are. So we're trying to be thoughtful of all the groups: African American, Latinx, neurodivergent, and girls through all of our partners and programs.
Dale, one of our cool new programs, which was just announced is in an affordable housing community. And this is something we've never done before, but we're looking to perhaps help some of these organizations. It's called Operation Pathways and they're in Stanford, Connecticut. Again, a little bit of bias because it's right down the street from me, but if it goes well, it then is a model they're looking to maybe take to Houston to Washington DC and New Orleans to give exposure to the youth who live within affordable housing units to have the intergenerational makerspace to bring ideas and creativity and empowerment across genders and age groups. So this is a cool one for people to pay attention to.
Dale: What's the name of that one?
Kate: It's Operation Pathways, an organization and they are in affordable housing. They sit in the National Public Housing Foundation or underneath, and we're working with Steph Santoso's Maker USA and CAST to weave in some universal design frameworks. We made a small or a humble investment in this makerspace.
But we'll see if it generates creativity, exposure, and also job opportunities for students who get this hands-on work to then plug into the wider Stanford Connecticut economic zone.
And that's really the hope, that it's seen as a little bit more of that workforce, that link to bring credentials, skills, and mindset exposure to change the trajectory for kids who are often marginalized. So that's what we're excited about. It's brand new, so you have to call me back in a few months to know how they're doing.
Dale: Okay, good. You raised this a little bit earlier, but I think one of the challenges to maker education has been there's many ways to help kids; school is one of them, but community centers, Boys and Girls Clubs, libraries, all have had approaches to this that are important.
In fact, I'd say that what we sometimes call informal education has understood and used hands-on learning, experiential learning a lot more than traditional education. So it's important. Also, we saw like in children's museums when they started creating makerspaces, that families came in and sat down and if they could recognize that this was a form of learning that was valuable for their child, they could encourage it and participate in that at home as well.
Kate: Through our Infy Makers Award, we try to pull out each of those that you just mentioned, where making is happening-- traditional classroom, libraries, makerspaces, youth serving organizations, et cetera, museums and try to invite any innovation and give these awards. It's a $10,000 award, but it's also some of educators who are listening or reading, I hope.
There's also a new component we added, which is a year of professional development with Digital Promise. So it's a small cohort of 10 educators who will then work together. This will be the second or third year we do it. To provide also, I think you mentioned this a little while ago, they're the teachers who are thinking in these ways are really at the forefront. They're really taking risks to do something different. And I think they need the camaraderie, the support, and a place to share those resources.
Dale: Completely agree. And in fact, we're thinking of doing something similar at Maker Ed. For the past programs that MakerEd has done around makerspaces in schools, what I heard from a lot of the participants was it was so good to be connected to other people doing this at the same time.
In some ways we don't need to be taught how to do this, but we love to learn from each other, right? And that sense of being in a cohort I think is really valuable.
Kate: Yeah, because they come in, they may have won the Infy Makers Award. Maybe there was something that our external judges really liked about their program. But maybe it's the first time they've ever done it. They have a closet for a 3D printer, and it may be another teacher who's been at this many years, but they're going in a different direction this year.
So it's like a range of expertise, knowledge, what works and what doesn't. So I think that coziness of the cohort is working, I hope. We also, Dale, we have these like time and date specific moments. We train teachers, but we also have a digital learning platform that's the Pathfinders Online Institute.
It's a total mouthful to say, but I want to just flag it because on that platform, which is free for all educators, there's maker content and a lot of it is just like practical applications for the classroom, like grab and do, or I can't think of the perfect words right now, but the idea was this worked for another educator, give it a whirl, listen to the module, look at the video, see how they structured an exercise for the kids, so that also, I just plant the seed. We invite educators who are maybe thinking of dabbling in this or what does it mean to hop over to the online platform or get in touch with us. We want to help as many educators as we can. We need you to all just come to us and make it known that you've got cool ideas and maybe you need some materials or kits or resources or how to guides or something else we haven't thought of.
Dale: So let's transition a little bit.
Future of the Technical Workforce
Dale: I'd like to talk about this idea I mentioned in the beginning of the technical workforce of the future. And it's certainly during my time in working with this for 20 years, it's frustrating that we're not getting more kids into what is really a very broad workforce.
It isn't just kids that can code. It is a lot of, I think that, problem solving, design all these different skill sets in today's workplace, you're combining those things. I can imagine at the company InfoSys, you have teams that work together even on the digital transformation to solve these problems. So what does the future look like to you and how do we get more kids into that future, participating in that future, controlling and changing that future, not just, working in it?
Kate: I think the future is bright for this generation because they're so savvy and really what they need is not necessarily a massively expensive intervention over a ton of time. Tech is exploding at lightning speed. So even what you and I are talking about today will probably be different a month or two quarters from now.
So that agility of a young student's mind to be able to pivot or to be what we call a lifelong learner. Companies like Infosys and many of our peers are pulling in talent, but knowing they will have to be trained and retrained, learn, unlearn, and pivot as things are evolving, particularly now that we're in this AI universe, particularly because of that.
Dale: And it's the ability to learn...
Kate: it's the ability to learn
Dale: Is what's really valuable here, not that you necessarily know everything, but people can trust you to figure these things out.
Kate: And I think the human side of this, the EQ, students who are taught to question and to think and to really listen and observe. We're going to require that kind of probing, questioning mentality because the technologies are going to do a lot for us. So we're going to have to push young students minds to think about, to be responsible citizens while they are equally tech creators.
I think a lot of the ethics and some of the philosophy and some of even the colleges that were more liberal arts driven, companies will need to draw from the tech engineering minds and also the liberal arts minds and put these teams together and learn how to collaborate.
Dale: I agree.
Kate: Like melting pot of how are you respectful? How are you culturally aware? How do you probe? Where do you get ideas from? I think the super savvy tech kids will still need maybe to be coders. I will just present the fact that we've been trying to bring in the neurodiverse into the foundation and into our Infosys intern program.
And this summer we did this for the first time. We have a leading internship program called INSTEP. It's nationally and globally renowned. And this year, Amrita Nayak, who's on my team, said we really need to ensure that we have diversity of, or inclusion, put into the mix. And so we had two children or students who were autistic, and on the foundation team, we took someone who was visually impaired.
She was blind and we felt it's a tiny step towards impacting the lens by which a company Infosys thinks about where we draw talent. And when you read the news and you hear about the superpowers of children who are autistic, they maybe work in different ways. But at the end of the day, their solutions, their perspective on the world, their capabilities really push the rest of us to think in different ways.
So our foundation just this summer tried to push Infosys, the behemoth that it is, in this new direction. And I think it will take companies becoming more aware that talent comes in different shapes and sizes. And I feel people are more savvy to this. So I think the future. is bright, but I am, I and the foundation are constantly trying to break down barriers.
Like we want kids in our office. We want them having experiences that change how they see themselves and how others see their capability. And that's that's a thread of the work that we do.
Dale: Different pathways for those kids to develop is important too. They don't want to go down this straight pathway. They want a mix of experience, and learning what you might call work experience and real world experience, not just book learning.
Kate: Yeah, we just had a program start with the University of Charlotte in North Carolina, and it's called the Infy Tech Pioneer Program. And again, we're working with the higher education pool, but someone recently said, we pulled that back and do it in high school. And the idea is that mix, identifying a student group who want to work with us for six to eight weeks and have almost an apprenticeship.
So they are trained in one of the concepts with the last one we did was on Gen AI . They had to learn and spend some time in the modules. They then got to work on a practical experience with an Infosys team. They had some mentorship and at the end they had to do a presentation. And that model is just one small speck of an approach that we can do or replicate for others. I'm convinced the students who went through that now have a certificate of completion. It changes the way they talk about their capability and they then seek more from that.
Dale: Kate, is there anything we didn't cover that you wanted to mention?
Kate: I'm good.
Dale: Can you give us a URL that people can follow up on?
Kate: To our Infosys Foundation. We are all the educators or others who are interested in following the work of Infosys Foundation USA. It's best to go to here but if you just Google the foundation, you will find us. We're also all over social media.
There is an Infosys foundation in India, which is distinct from the work that we do. So the USA part is critical to our name and the work that we're doing. And like I said, we've we're celebrating our 10 year anniversary this May, 2025. We've had a lot of successes.
We've learned a lot along the way. We've had pivots, but we're going into this new era and I think there's an invitation to makers or to educators to see us as a resource and a partner. So if you have ideas and you want to raise them, please see us with an open door to being able to think in new ways alongside.
Dale: Thank you, Kate. It was a pleasure talking to you today.