The schools and universities in Bulgaria have a primarily theoretical educational approach and children in small towns and villages have limited access to cutting edge technologies, experienced IT specialists and extracurricular activities. In alignment with SAP’s global mission, we are striving to make the world around us a better place by helping students to obtain better education. In the last 10 years, we are creating meaningful programs for school pupils, teachers and university students and by sharing the knowledge of our colleagues, we inspire young people to choose an educational path in the STEM field and thus enhance the capacity of standard education and prepare the younger generation for high achievements.

SAP ITversity encapsulates all different educational activities we offer for students from 4th grade in schools up to university students in their 4th year. We create long-term collaborations with schools and universities. Part of the initiatives are application-based and a selection process takes place and the other part are with free access. In 2022 alone we have reached 279 teachers, 2063 students and 42% of all engaged students are female.

The project is in line with CSR goals of the company–building future skills through investment in innovative educational models and large-scale partnerships. SAP’s CSR policy focuses on high quality and effective education in the STEM field, by creating and developing long-term interest in young generation for science subjects through skill- and knowledge-based volunteering of our employees. Every year around 150 colleagues are participating, and we are able to reach more than 2000 young people.

We are organizing different learning activities – courses in universities, student practices, training activities, olympiads or competitions, hackathons, etc. Open Tournament in Informatics of Sofia – 9 editions done, reaching more than 1450 students. Since 2012/2013 SAP Labs Bulgaria started a partnership with leading universities to create courses that are practice-oriented. We offer 6 courses in FMI, supported student practices and equipped a modern Robotics and IoT room. We have contributed to the development of more than 2400 students in IT. Back2School – colleagues visit schools from which they graduated as role models. Since 2014/2015 more than 110 volunteers from SAP realized more than 74 visits in 60 schools and reached above 3960 students. The program “Robotics for Bulgaria” has started in 2015 as an answer to the missing opportunity for early career orientation of children up to 16, as well as a way to address the additional professional development for school teachers in the area of science and technologies. In the program, more than 2500 students have participated actively, more than 250 school teachers and 100 schools in 55 cities and villages have been e

The most inspiring effect of these long-term initiatives is the moment when a new hire shares that they were inspired for a career in the IT field by one of our programs. In most cases such colleagues after the initial onboarding start to actively participate as volunteers and return to support the further cohorts of young people. For example, in the program “Robotics for Bulgaria” big portion of the judges are students who participated previously, and teachers who start to work in a new school search immediately for the possibility to join with a new team and enroll the school in the program.